Catalog and Metadata Services: Strategic Vision Forum

Cataloging and Metadata at Yale

"In the new era of expanding digital resources, where metadata provides the infrastructure for library collections, metadata specialists, including Catalog Librarians and Archivists, will be the leaders in developing and promoting new bibliographic models and services that integrate the Library's collections regardless of format, and facilitate the use of Yale collections by enabling our resources to be integrated with those from other collections on campus and around the world."

"Long-term preservation of digital objects depends heavily upon the use of reliable, well-documented content formats and upon the consistent application of metadata. Likewise, the success of cross-collection searching (whether federated or harvested) also depends heavily on predictable metadata that adheres to national standards and well-documented practices."

"Easier electronic access to scholarly materials" ... "Providing students with digital access to research and instructional materials," and "Providing better search tools to locate materials across all of Yale's holdings and collections."

Cataloging and Metadata in the 21st Century

"We will do cataloging differently in the future while retaining the best of basic cataloging principles and the benefits of authority control. Our tools not only will improve future catalogs but also information seeking systems of tomorrow’s world."

"Today, a large and growing number of students and scholars routinely bypass library catalogs in favor of other discovery tools, and the catalog represents a shrinking proportion of the universe of scholarly information. The catalog is in decline, its processes and structures are unsustainable, and change needs to be swift."

"The Calhoun report is very much a latter-day Procrustean bed for the library field. It forces academic institutions into an inappropriate business model, and lops off the goal of scholarship if it does not fit the criterion of increasing 'market position.'"

" Even if all other aspects of the system worked perfectly, poor quality metadata would degrade the quality of the resulting library. " ... Minimally descriptive metadata, like Dublin Core, is still minimally descriptive even after multiple quality repairs.

"Catalogers must learn several metadata schemes and organizational structures beyond AACR and the MARC record. They must free themselves from thinking in terms of flat files and linear access and begin to think in terms of multi-scheme data registries, new record constructs, and relational data models… They must envision a new spectrum of authority control that includes many types of identifiers along with the more familiar names, titles, and subjects. And most critically, catalogers must actively participate in the development of system architectures and data registries . Only this level of activity will ensure that catalogers play a key role in the development of authority control systems for electronic resources."

"I recently conducted my first harvest. Not pulling in corn or wheat but bibliographic records. Before long I had nearly 100,000 of them on my laptop, all describing free online resources held by five different libraries. Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) it was a breeze—anyone could do it with the right software, of which there is much to choose from. But I could hardly believe the results. What I had was a pile of metadata problems that in hindsight I should have expected. Certainly those who have created union catalogs could predict some of the issues. ... It was a complete mess."

Links

• Quotations (i.e.,this page): http://www.library.yale.edu/~dlovins/forumquotes.html




• Department Mission, Vision and Goals : http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/Vision%20Statement%20010107.doc




• Vision and Directions Task Force Annotated Bibliography http://www.library.yale.edu/~dlovins/biblio.html