Identities and relationships: parallels between metadata and professional relevance.

摘要

Publishers’ information discovery and access platforms use metadata to provide faceted displays, links to author profiles, and other enticing enhancements. I find it ironic that these competing products are essentially catalogs, craftily biased to promote their own brands of content. Not only do our library budgets pay and repay for this content, but we also fund the duplicative system development—which competes directly with our own efforts to provide integrated interfaces to our emerging digital libraries. This puts libraries at risk of diminished ‘‘market position’’ vis-a` -vis such private-sector solutions, which benefit from the fragmentation that we strive to overcome.