Page 82 - Building Digital Libraries

General-Purpose Technologies Useful for Digital Repositories

with enough familiarity to use the new metadata schemas. Moreover, many
organizations have difficulty integrating new metadata schemas and bib-
liographic descriptive guidelines into existing workflows that are designed
primarily for the acquisition and processing of print materials. As noted in
previous chapters, when building a successful digital platform, libraries need
to create new workflows and new acquisition processes to accommodate the
dynamic nature of the materials. So too must an organization look at the
metadata requirements for a digital repository. Individuals like Roy Ten-
nant, senior program officer at OCLC, have long argued that for libraries to
truly integrate their digital content, their bibliographic infrastructure must
change dramatically. This change must include both the metadata creation
and delivery methods of bibliographic content. The days of a homogenous
bibliographic standard for all content has ended; the present and the future
will likely see more specialized descriptive formats created and utilized
within cultural heritage organizations, and it will be up to new and emerging
systems to find ways to support these changing requirements and descrip-
tive needs. Like many systems outside of the library community, the future
direction of digital library platform software will be defined less by the abil-
ity to support very specific metadata formats or descriptive standards, and
more by the system’s ability to be generally metadata-agnostic, and support
a wide range of data models and descriptive rules. This is obviously much
harder to do, and is achieved outside the library community through the
use of semantic data principles and RDF data models. Whether this can be
achieved within the library community remains to be seen. But at the very
least, this means that organizations will need to look beyond MARC or any
particular metadata format, and instead focus on the ways in which digital
library platform software supports and relates together data created using
different data models.

XML in Libraries

Cultural heritage organizations have long been early implementers of XML-
based descriptive schemas. Early on, these communities identified many
of the potential benefits that XML-based metadata schemas could have for
libraries. This led many libraries to be early adopters of efforts like TEI, EAD,
MODS, FGDC, and so on. What’s more, as the lines between the library
and the publishing community have blurred, more libraries have found
themselves producing digital publications or digitizing their existing analog
collections. Issues relating to document delivery, indexing, and display have
pushed the library community to consider XML-based markup languages
as a method of preserving digital and bibliographical information. Today,
XML-based schemas have become ubiquitous within the digital publica-
tion systems used by libraries, and the conversation has shifted away from
a discussion of the benefits of such systems, and toward the need to develop
systems that take greater advantage of the rich or semantic web. Before
looking at how XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and to a lesser degree,
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