Revisiting the foundations of information discovery and access systems

Abstract

AbstractEach year, the pace of building digital resource and data repositories increases. Multiple challenges face each project, for which no adequate technological solution may exist. The focus of this panel moves beyond construction to address the question: What assumptions and principles lie beneath the technology scaffolding digital environments? The members of this panel are engaged in open exploration and reconsideration of the roles played by representational and organizational structures that seek to support, and which sometimes impair discovery, access and use. These structures take shape in metadata, vocabulary and classificatory frameworks. Specific topics covered will include heritage classificatory work well‐suited for application in digital environments, an inversion of the role of metadata as infrastructure for documents, application of bibliographic relationship taxonomies such as FRBR in tracking the life cycle of data objects, and potential definition and organizational roles to be played by collection level representations.