New media, new knowledge practices, and concepts point to the need for greater understanding of cognitive processes underlying knowledge acquisition and generation in open informational worlds. The authors of the articles in this special issue address cognitive and instructional challenges surrounding multiple document comprehension--a…

This is a compilation of 12 primers on important information standards and protocols. These primers are: (1) Atom; (2) COinS; (3) MADS; (4) MARC 21/MARCXML; (5) MIX; (6) MXG; (7) OpenSearch; (8) PREMIS; (9) RESTful HTTP; (10) unAPI; (11) XMPP (aka Jabber); and (12) ZeeRex. The Atom Syndication Format defines a new XML-based syndication format for…

How should scarce resources available to produce metadata be deployed to support discovery in different contexts? How might metadata harvesting be exploited to support new interfaces and enhanced navigation among related resources in digital libraries? This article starts a conversation between metadata providers and service builders by describing…

The Dublin Core (DC) Element Set and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol have provided a solid foundation for the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) framework. More precision is needed in community-specific aspects of resource description than is offered by DC, and many of the potential participants in OLAC do not have the technical…

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) is designed to facilitate discovery of the "hidden web" of scholarly information, such as that contained in databases, finding aids, and XML documents. OAI-PMH supports standardized exchange of metadata describing items in disparate collections, of such as those…

At the sixth Dublin Core Metadata Workshop convened in Washington, DC, in November 19998, a work plan was developed to address unresolved issues in resource description. This report summarizes that work plan, highlights the progress that has been made on it and identifies a few significant projects that exemplify this progress. (AEF)

This special section of the "Bulletin" includes an introduction and the following articles: "New Metadata Standards for Digital Resources: MODS (Metadata Object and Description Schema) and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard)"; "Metadata Generation: Processes, People and Tools"; "Data Collection for…

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undertook a project to test the efficacy of using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to construct a search and discovery service focused on information resources in the domain of cultural heritage. Provides an overview of the Illinois project, with quantitative data about…

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting program presents a method by which metadata regarding archives and manuscripts can be shared and made more interoperable with metadata from other sources. Outlines a method for exposing hierarchical metadata from encoded archival description (EAD) files and assesses some…

Describes emerging metadata practice and standards. Gives an overview of the environments in which metadata is used, before focusing on metadata for information resources. Outlines an approximate typology of approaches and explores different strands of metadata activity. Discusses trends in format development, metadata management, and use of…

Defines metadata, noting that standard bibliographic information, summaries, indexing terms, and abstracts are all surrogates for original material, hence metadata. Discusses the need for metadata; creating metadata; search engines and how metadata affects searching; abstracts; and future possibilities. (AEF)

Defines virtual documents and categorizes them, roughly, on how they are created, such as using templates, from computations, as composites, and as metadata. Describes the following information retrieval problems with virtual documents: search, revisiting, authentication, reference, version control, and annotation. (AEF)

Discusses three kinds of metadata--Dublin Core (DC), MARC21 (formerly USMARC), and Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)--and how they are used in the Energy & Environmental Information Resources Center (EE-IR Center), a digital special library of text, numeric, and geospatial data in Lafayette, Louisiana. Includes 5 figures. (Contains 48…

Describes efforts of three official metadata standards-setting bodies. Discusses the three categories of metadata formats; metadata registries; the Dublin Core and its relatives; several geospatial and biological metadata projects; and vocabularies/data element content. Provides a list of links to metadata projects and resources. (AEF)

Museums hold enormous amounts of information in collections management systems and publish academic and scholarly research in print journals, exhibition catalogs, virtual museum presentations, and community publications. Much of this rich content is unavailable to web search engines or otherwise gets lost in the vastness of the World Wide Web. The…