Introduction

A librarian sits at his or her work station, assisting students with questions about what to read next, checking in book returns and, when a quiet moment presents itself, cataloguing the new books and entering them into the library catalogue. With a simple title search within the catalogue, the vendor's discovery system identifies whether or not the book is a new title. If the title is new, a selection of Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records is presented. The records are often pulled from libraries sharing the same vendor discovery system or consortium, or from the vendor itself. The librarian chooses a record, edits it as needed, and adds the book to the growing collection available for discovery in the library's catalogue. With ease and efficiency, the librarian is able to add titles to the collection, while continuing day-to-day tasks within the library.

This is a common, everyday practice among thousands, if not tens of thousands of librarians each day. It happens in school, public, special and academic libraries. The availability of records for downloading or sharing from consortia and, increasingly, vendors assists librarians, and greatly reduces the need for timeintensive original cataloguing and, in many cases, the editing of simple, bare-bones MARC records. The benefit of these records for download, sharing, or editing should not be disputed. Indeed, this chapter will take the position that having these records available is essential to the continued growth of collections available through catalogues. These records allow librarians to make titles available to users in short order, in many cases making titles available much sooner than if the record had to be created in-house. Why, then, do we need to discuss the outsourcing of library metadata and indexing? If there is a direct benefit to the availability of MARC records, why is there a need to examine the source of those records when received from vendors?

To assume that the only metadata libraries receive from vendors is in the form of MARC records is to take a very narrow, singular view on the rich metadata now available in online catalogues. The following sections of this chapter will introduce the depth of rich metadata and indexing that is available beyond online catalogues. Specifically, web-scale discovery services that aggregate, index and disseminate large quantities of information such as full text articles, summaries and abstracts will be examined.