DIGITAL LIBRARIES: Metadata's Bitter Harvest

摘要

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. Even so, union catalog efforts typically deal with the same type of records (MARC) using the same set of rules (AACR2). What I saw occurs when there is only a very simple format (Dublin Core) and no application rules to speak of. It was a complete mess.