Metadata are crucial for discovery and access by providing contextual, technical, and administrative information in a standard form. Yet metadata are also sites of tension between sociocultural representations, resource constraints, and standardized systems. Formal and informal interventions may be interpreted as quality issues, political acts to…

Discovery of digital items by scholars and the public is highly dependent upon effective metadata to ensure inclusion and prioritization in search engines. Subject descriptions based on controlled vocabulary, such as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH), are particularly useful to enhance discovery, but they may be expensive to provide. In…

This dissertation focuses on investigating whether users will locate desired images more efficiently and effectively when they are provided with information descriptors from both experts and the general public. This study develops a way to support image finding through a human-computer interface by providing subject headings and social tags about…

The study looked into the 307 Koha libraries listed in Breeding's Library Technology Guides. Since all the tag clouds in Koha are user-contributed, their adoption and usage can shed light on the extent to which libraries are supporting user tagging. The research also revealed that public library users are more actively involved in tagging than…

BeaverTracks Historical Locations and Walking Tour is a mobile project at Oregon State University (OSU), where the author serves as programmer/analyst. It connects the past to the present by linking historic images to current campus locations. The goal of BeaverTracks is to showcase and bring attention to OSU Libraries' digital collections as well…

This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding…

An unprecedented amount of information encompassing almost every facet of human activities across the world is generated daily in the form of zeros and ones, and that is often the only form in which such information is recorded. A good fraction of this information needs to be preserved for periods of time ranging from a few years to centuries.…

Resource description (cataloging or indexing) is undergoing scrutiny with the growth of and access to digital resources. This article describes the evolving means of making documents and document-like objects bibliographically accessible by the library cataloging community. Discusses metadata elements, library cataloging objectives and record…

This paper compares the subject indexing on articles pertaining to Immanuel Kant, agriculture, and aging that are found simultaneously in Humanities Index, Academic Search Elite (EBSCO) and Periodicals Research II (Micromedia ProQuest), in order to show that there are substantial variations in the depth and quality of indexing in these databases.…

Examines strengths and weaknesses of organizational systems developed to organize and access electronic resources available via the Internet. Highlights include library online catalogs; cataloging rules and MARC records; text encoding initiative (TEI) headers; the Internet union catalog; browsing lists; robot-generated indexes; a core data set of…

Provides an overview of this special issue on organizing resources on the Internet and discusses metadata. Topics include full-text indexing; adding additional data, or metadata; user needs; standard library cataloging; examples of the use of metadata; development of GEM (Gateway to Educational Materials); Dublin Core; and OCLC efforts. (LRW)

This book examines what has been done in providing subject access to networked resources. The first chapter provides a historical overview of information services, developments in information technology, end users, and the Internet, as well as a discussion of the library response to these developments. The second chapter discusses metadata,…

Offers a brief history of the Dublin Core initiative, an international, interdisciplinary effort to define a core set of elements for resource discovery. Describes outcomes of Dublin Core Workshops 1-4. Discusses outcomes of the Helsinki Metadata Workshop, focusing on the "Finnish Finish" which will form the basis of the first formal…

A group of research projects based at HP-Labs Bristol, the University of Bristol (England) and ARKive (a new large multimedia database project focused on the worlds biodiversity based in the United Kingdom) are working to develop a flexible model for the indexing of multimedia collections that allows users to annotate content utilizing extensible…

This paper begins with some general remarks about the indexing of electronic publications. Characteristics of today's information world are highlighted, including decentralization, distributed data collections, and heterogeneous data structures and indexing procedures. Three possible models for managing access to information are summarized: a…