CHAPTER 7

CATALOGING AND METADATA CREATION IN DIGITAL INFORMATION ORGANIZATION: OLD CONCEPTS, NEW CHALLENGES

Beth Davis-Brown

INTRODUCTION

The promise of digital libraries implies the possibility of disseminating materials and information far beyond what has ever been imagined. Early digital library efforts, such as the Library of Congress' National Digital Library Program and the projects sponsored by the digital library I and II initiatives in the United States, showcase digital facsimiles of unique documents and artifacts previously available only to curators and scholars. In Japan, the National Diet Library, Kyoto University Library, the University of Tsukuba, and the University of Library and Information Science are actively planning to publish digital content on the World Wide Web (see site reports, Appendix C). One could view "digital information organization" as having two facets:

1. The creation of cataloging information to enable searching, discovery, and retrieval of information in digital format.
2. Accomplishing this task with methods that scale to effectively handle quantities of data exponentially larger than libraries have ever done. A key issue impacting the wide dissemination of digital information is the scalability of providing information (metadata) to structure and enable searching, navigation, and presentation of online documents. This paper will address some of the issues involved in creating cataloging and metadata, and discuss attributes of print documents and other analog formats that must be replicated in the electronic environment.

This author's participation in the WTEC study tour stemmed from experience in cataloging and classification and as manager of a team that digitizes historical legal materials for the Law Library of Congress and the National Digital Library Program. As the only "librarian" on the study tour, the author paid special attention to problems and issues concerning metadata creation and scalability of cataloging systems. These issues are just being articulated in both Japan and the United States, and call for thought and discussion. The goal of this chapter is to provide an introduction to factors that impact the growth of digital library technology and content from a practitioner's perspective.

On the surface, provision of metadata to accompany digital objects does not seem difficult. Roughly speaking, many people think that all that must be done is to take existing cataloging information, convert it to the appropriate format, and link it to the digital images. The process is not that simple due to several factors. First of all, the conversion of a physical artifact implies not just putting information into a new format but the concomitant goal to display the information in a logical way. To do that, information in addition to the content must be produced or extracted to enable the structure and display of the data. If existing schemes for classification and indexing are used, human intellectual capital is necessary at some point in the process to apply thesaurus terms and enable other access points (catalog).