Special section: metadata

Karen Calhoun*

Guest Editor, Assistant University Librarian for Technical Services, Cornell University, 107D Olin Library,Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs astep at a time.” Mark Twain [1]

1. Introduction

In the past thirty years, library technical services departments have been the source of alargely unacknowledged miracle. They, together with innovators like Fred Kilgour andHenriette Avram, have built an internationally shared, cooperative cataloging system thatmakes millions of catalog records available to students, scholars and community members,leading them to well over a billion items in libraries around the world. Along the way,technical services departments have saved their libraries millions of dollars by reducingredundant effort and lowering the costs of collection development, acquisitions, catalogingand reference work. Furthermore, although thirty years have passed, I believe that theprocesses, knowledge base, and organizational structures that support cooperative catalogingstill function well; arguably they represent the best of the library world’s good habits.

Today, library technical services departments have a new imperative: to carry forwardtheir role to organize the world’s information and apply it in the digital age. At the heart ofthe necessary transition is envisioning the future of technical services as a future withmillions upon millions of digital objects and e-resources in it. It is therefore a future withmetadata in it.

Mark Twain puts a new twist on the conventional wisdom that old habits die hard. Whenthey are good habits, that is just as it should be. One library habit or best practice is the formor subset of metadata called library cataloging, based on AACR2 and MARC. Usuallyhandcrafted, one by one, by catalogers with years of training and experience, catalog recordsare extremely valuable for facilitating discovery and access.

* Corresponding author. Tel.:�1-607-255-9915.E-mail address: ksc10@cornell.edu (K. Calhoun).

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Nevertheless many libraries, faced with supporting discovery and access to a mountain ofhigh-demand digital objects and e-resources, are finding traditional catalog records too slowand costly to produce. As a result, many are experimenting—sometimes reluctantly or witha touch of regret—with less expensive and faster alternatives outside traditional cataloging,that is, new forms of metadata.

Metadata has become a central strategic issue in libraries. The committee that producedLC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress [2] noted

It is certain that library-type metadata practices will at some point need to be reexamined inthe light of a changed world . . . It is not productive to ignore the fact that changes areinevitable and will be dramatic . . . [Our] concerns are related to the committee’s belief thatthe current turmoil in metadata has profound implications for libraries and to its understand-ing of how enormously difficult it is going to be for the library world to evolve in responseto these changes . . . There is an enormous need for educating the library community on theimplications of current developments, for creating initiatives to coordinate strategies, and forbecoming seriously involved in the key metadata initiatives under way today, to ensure thatactions taken are informed by the needs of the library community.

While these words were directed to the leadership of the Library of Congress, they areequally important to library leaders throughout the profession. While it is essential to keepthe library community’s good habits going (among them, cataloging and cooperative cata-loging systems), librarians will also need to foster some new metadata habits.

This special section of Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Services presentssome articles intended to increase awareness of what metadata is; how it is (or could be)used, exchanged and shared; and its application in libraries. In exploring what metadata is,my colleague Tom Turner [3] has given a helpful functional definition, rather than the tiredold “data about data” :

Metadata

Y helps you find and/or manage informationY serves particular purposesY can be used by people and/or machinesY often has structure and/or content rulesY can be created by people or by machines

In contrast to traditional library cataloging, in which policies, rules, and what is to beaccomplished do not vary much, metadata applications can vary a good deal, depending oncontext, audience, purpose, and what data elements are available to be harvested or re-purposed. There is no one best way to produce or use metadata, there are many suitable ways;a multiplicity of metadata types is a fact of life; the challenge is then how to map or moveamong a variety of metadata types.

In this LCATS issue, Chandler and Westbrooks’ article focuses on the problem of how towidely and effectively share non-MARC metadata both within and outside the librarycommunity. While the broad sharing of MARC records is so much a part of the librarylandscape that it is taken for granted, no similarly well-established means yet exists forexchanging metadata that is produced using other metadata standards. Emphasizing thetremendous value and power of the MARC standard and the shared cataloging network that

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rests upon it, Chandler and Westbrooks describe how they met the challenge of sharing theirproject’s geospatial metadata through both MARC-based systems and the Open ArchivesInitiative (OAI).

Reference linking is a hot topic in the metadata community. Blake and Knudsen of the LosAlamos National Laboratory’s “Library Without Walls” have been building reference linkingsystems since the mid 1990s. Since November 2000, their library has been in production withSFX, a linking system that uses the OpenURL framework. In their article, Blake andKnudsen elucidate the complexities of linking from an online citation to the full text of thecited article. Accomplishing the link requires a system that can manipulate the metadatafound in the citation to create a unique identifier and target the appropriate full-text article.The authors demonstrate through examples the linking problems that are created by theinconsistencies in citation metadata. They conclude with a call for greater standardization incitation metadata and a list of goals for achieving more robust and useful reference linkingsystems.

Some librarians say that digital library projects are out of reach for their libraries; only thelargest, best funded libraries can afford them. Woodley, in her article on the San FernandoValley History Digital Archive, demonstrates that a modest grant and the willingness tocollaborate with others can have a huge impact. Her description of how her library built thishighly successful digital collection contains much practical guidance for those just gettingstarted with digitization and metadata projects. Besides funding and administrative informa-tion, Woodley shares what her team learned about metadata workflow and standards.

Through their work, all of the authors have become seriously involved in metadatainitiatives inside and outside libraries. In doing so, they are not only communicating thelibrary community’s needs to the broader metadata community, they are also creating forumsin which library technical services expertise and best practices can influence the library,education, vendor, publishing, and information technology communities around the world. Itis my hope that these three articles will be just the beginning of LCATS support for sharingthe knowledge and practical experiences of our profession’s current and future metadataexperts.

References

[1] Twain, Mark. Quote from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar” in Pudd’nhead Wilson. Leipzig: BernhardTauchnitz, 1895, p. 63.

[2] National Academy of Science. Committee on an Information Technology Strategy for the Library ofCongress. Organizing intellectual access to digital information: from cataloging to metadata. In: LC21: Adigital strategy for the Library of Congress. Washington DC: National Academy Press, 2001, p. 142.Available: http://books.nap.edu/books/0309071445/html/index.html.

[3] Turner, Tom. What is metadata? Kaleidoscope 10:7 (February 2002), 1. Available: http://www.library.cornell.edu/staffweb/Kaleidoscope/feb02.pdf.

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