Abstract
Standardization both reflects and facilitates the collaborative and networked approach to metadata creation within the fields of librarianship and archival studies. These standards—such as Resource Description and Access and Rules for Archival Description—and the theoretical frameworks they embody enable professionals to work more effectively together. Yet such guidelines also determine who is qualified to undertake the work of cataloging and processing in libraries and archives. Both fields are empathetic to facilitating user-generated metadata and have taken steps towards collaborating with their research communities (as illustrated, for example, by social tagging and folksonomies) but these initial experiments cannot yet be regarded as widely adopted and radically open and social. This paper explores the recent histories of descriptive work in libraries and archives and the challenges involved in departing from deeply established models of metadata creation.
Highlights
The fields of librarianship and archival studies have a long history of deeply collaborative and networked approaches to creating and circulating knowledge, from authority files for people, places, and subjects shared across institutions, to the first union lists, which compiled metadata across regional and national boundaries in order to provide unified access to information about cultural resources
To what extent do these metadata ecosystems allow for open and social contribution? The distinct histories of archival and library metadata practice will be explored and differences in their approaches to metadata will be highlighted in order to help bring this issue into focus
Annotations, and publishing anomalies may set off an item as unique and noted as such, the entire library metadata model is driven by the idea that many libraries hold what amounts to the same thing
Summary
Standardization both reflects and facilitates the collaborative and networked approach to metadata creation within the fields of librarianship and archival studies. These standards—such as Resource Description and Access and Rules for Archival Description—and the theoretical frameworks they embody enable professionals to work more effectively together. Such guidelines determine who is qualified to undertake the work of cataloging and processing in libraries and archives. This paper explores the recent histories of descriptive work in libraries and archives and the challenges involved in departing from deeply established models of metadata creation
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