Developing a Metadata Element Set for Organizing Literary Works:A Survey of the American Literary Communityt

摘要

Various approaches have been taken to organizing literary works, but finding the most effective set of metadata elements remains an unfinished task. This paper focuses on exploring five inductively built sets for organizing new literary works for discovery by members of the American literary community. The sets feature potential metadata elements drawn from a variety of sources, including present and proposed systems, as well as prior theoretical work. The paper describes a survey study that asked members of the American literary community for input about what potential metadata elements they would be likely to use to aid the process of discovering new literary work. The paper discusses the results for each set and discusses possibilities for a new set that combines the most desirable metadata elements from each of the separate sets.