Metadata and Bibliographic Description

Current thinking in library science veers between two extremes. Some argue that Web systems are fundamentally different from library catalogues, and that the catalogue is increasingly meaningless to information users raised on Google. Others argue that Web systems are only reinventing what librarians discovered long ago. Either way, consensus is growing that locally-maintained library catalogues are becoming economically untenable, that the task of cataloguing must be outsourced to third-party cataloguing agencies, and that catalogues must be made less complex and less detailed if they are to appear alongside, and combine with, other data sources on the Web. What then becomes of cataloging as an academic discipline and theory of practice?By way of an answer, Grant Campbell compares traditional cataloguing to metadata creation by demonstrating how the four primary cataloguing concepts--editions, information sources, authority records and main entries--far from being relics of a bygone age, actually anticipate the growth of key metadata concepts, including XML namespaces, the Dublin Core, the Resource Description Framework, metadata harvesting and ontology languages. He concludes with a cogent argument in support of FRBR.For students and practitioners interested in creating crosswalks and interoperable systems that will enable libraries to play an active role in future Web systems.



Current thinking in library science veers between two extremes. Some argue that Web systems are fundamentally different from library catalogues, and that the catalogue is increasingly meaningless to information users raised on Google. Others argue that Web systems are only reinventing what librarians discovered long ago. Either way, consensus is growing that locally-maintained library catalogues are becoming economically untenable, that the task of cataloguing must be outsourced to third-party cataloguing agencies, and that catalogues must be made less complex and less detailed if they are to appear alongside, and combine with, other data sources on the Web. What then becomes of cataloging as an academic discipline and theory of practice?^LBy way of an answer, Grant Campbell compares traditional cataloguing to metadata creation by demonstrating how the four primary cataloguing concepts--editions, information sources, authority records and main entries--far from being relics of a bygone age, actually anticipate the growth of key metadata concepts, including XML namespaces, the Dublin Core, the Resource Description Framework, metadata harvesting and ontology languages. He concludes with a cogent argument in support of FRBR.^LFor students and practitioners interested in creating crosswalks and interoperable systems that will enable libraries to play an active role in future Web systems.