Library of Congress Metadata Landscape

摘要

The Library of Congress (LC) has many of the same challenges as other libraries, especially large ones. LC has many different types of resources - books, journals, maps, music, manuscripts, audio, moving image, still image, artifacts, electronic - with large collections of each. Different levels of access are needed for this material: for some, collection level bibliographic description is adequate; for many, item level access is adequate; but for others, such as sound recordings, analytic, or sub unit access is highly desirable. The sizes of the LC collections are a major challenge -over 125 million non-electronic and over 3 million electronic items (and growing rapidly). And finally, electronic resources are presenting us with new issues - from metadata to preservation to storage to linking techniques. LC has tried to approach these challenges from a service perspective. Access must be successful for the end user, which mandates as much coherence and consistency in the metadata as possible and access systems that are easy to use. This paper focuses on the Library of Congress' perspective on metadata in the following three areas: (1) descriptive metadata in our current operations, (2) pathways that are developing that will support possible evolution in the future, and (3) broader metadata needs with digital material. The discussion is from a metadata element set and format point of view, not a cataloging data and cataloging rules view. Most acronyms used in this paper are expanded in an Appendix.