Metadata and the Librarian's Role
in Managing Digital Resources

MARC, DC, EAD, GILS, TEI, HTML, XHTML, VRA, ONIX, MODS, METS as if the library world did not already have enough acronyms, the past decade has brought dozens more in the names of metadata schemes, with the promise of even more as information technology progresses.

It's difficult, in the current era of information formats, to avoid the subject of metadata, especially for librarians involved in technical services. As more and more libraries embark on digital library initiatives and develop collections of resources that exist only in digital format, the question of how to make such resources accessible to the public becomes urgent. With their unique history of organizing information, the role of librarians in providing the answer to that question has not always been clear cut.

Information technology workers outside the library field have gotten involved, as telecommunications has made the task of making digital resources available to potential users a concern to the nonlibrary world. Creators of metadata schemes (aside from MARC) have not always been librarians, though librarians have made use of metadata schemes created by non- librarians, probably most commonly to make infor- mation available on the World Wide Web using hypertext markup language (HTML).

For librarians to take an active role in the management of digital content, we will have to learn to utilize metadata other than MARC. The question of ensuring that there are adequate opportunities for educating ourselves about metadata was taken up by the Library of Congress (LC) during its Bicentennial Conference on "Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium," in November 2000. As a result of that conference, LC issued its Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan, available at lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/actionplan.html. The action plan includes a charge to the Joint LIS (Library and Information Science) Education Task Force of ALCTS/ALISE (the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services and the Association for Library and Information Science Education).

The charge to the task force was to improve and enhance curricula in library and information schools, to adequately prepare professional librarians for the task of bibliographic control of digital resources. One of the task force's activities was to organize the recent ALA Midwinter preconference workshop to address the issue, Preparing 21st Century Cataloging and Metadata Professionals: A Workshop for Educators and Trainers, sponsored by ALCTS, ALISE, LC and OCLC. I felt fortunate to have been able to attend.

One of the consistent themes of the workshop was that the basic theories of information organization that librarians learn as part of their professional preparation are still with us, though the methods by which we organize information resources and data change over time. The pace of that change has become rapid. With the sheer number of metadata schemes in the dozens, or hundreds, and increasing still, it is impossible to train all librarians in all of them.

Depending on a librarian's professional goals and role, education may range from the basics of the information life cycle and the principles of its organization (useful for any librarian) to a thorough command of cataloging standards, skills in evaluating the efficacy and utility of one metadata scheme over another and practice with implementation of metadata within a digital collection (for the cataloging and/or metadata decision maker within a library).

The necessity of integrating metadata education into the continuing, or initial, education of librarians is a given. The work of the Joint Task Force, of individual library and information science schools and of organizations providing learning opportunities to librarians, will be to do so, and their work is ongoing.

The Joint Task Force's report, Cataloging and Metadata Education: A Proposal for Preparing Cataloging Professionals in the 21st Century, is available as a PDF document at www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/CatalogingandMetadataEducation.pdf.

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February 27, 2008
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