Introduction

In Chapters 2 and 3 ‘Why digitize?’ and ‘Developing collections in the digital world’ we looked at how decisions might be made in libraries about digitizing local holdings, and how libraries are dealing with the plethora of digital information that they are buying or licensing from major information providers. There are new formats, new resources and new players in the traditional venues of information supply, and the changes are rapid and bewildering. In this chapter, we consider the complexity of the new information spaces within which libraries are operating. We show how the limitations of search engines create confusion and effort for users, and discuss alternative models of resource construction and description, and of metadata creation. We examine the crucial roles played by the library and librarians in bringing some order into the chaos.

This chapter will discuss the following issues:

• • the world wide web: structure

• • the world wide web: content

• • libraries and the web

• • search engines and their limitations

• • resource description

• • metadata

• • types of metadata

• • metadata schemas

• • other metadata systems

• • collection-level description

• • metadata creation

• • collaborative projects in resource description and discovery

The world wide web: structure

In Chapter 1 ‘Digital futures in current contexts’, we describe briefly the origins and structure of the internet and the world wide web, which are interdependent concepts, given that the structure grew out of the origins. The web is now the largest information space that the world has ever known, and it continues to grow exponentially. Any estimate of how large and complex the web is will always be inaccurate and out of date the instant it is computed. Nevertheless, the scale is frightening: recent analyses report that there are currently around 100 billion hypertext links on the web, and projects which are attempting to map these links suggest that the complexity is on a level with that of the human genome (Denison, 2001; Jackson, 2001; Nuttall, 2001).