From Paul Anderson of Intelligent Content Ltd comes the announcement of the latest JISC report. Understanding metadata – the possibilities, purposes, and functioning in a Library 2.0 world, or even the information architecture world of any online information source, is crucial. If you want to keep up-to-date, or find out what this ‘metadata’ talk is all about, then now is as good a time as any to grab a coffee and start reading.
Metadata for digital libraries: state of the art and future directions
Paul Anderson says:
The Web is having a profound impact on the role and function of libraries. This goes way beyond ‘the demise of the book’, which is, quite frankly, a very simplistic way of looking at things. It’s actually more about having a vision for the future and how you realise that v
ision. For example, one of the problems facing librarians is how to create high quality ‘digital objects’, as they are called. If you think about a book, you might judge its quality in terms of the jacket design or the type of paper used or whether or not you can see guillotine marks on the edge of the pages. You probably wouldn’t think about some of the very obvious quality factors unless they were missing. If you opened a book and, say, the pictures were missing or all the pages were in the wrong order, you’d probably want your money back.
The problem for librarians is that when you are creating things like e-books, you have to think about a different set of ‘quality’ criteria because these digital objects will not be used in the same way that physical books are. They will need to designed so that they can be searched, for example, or delivered as separate pages. For the average library user, accessing information that spans multiple digital sources is increasingly a messy process and for those who are used to search tools such as Google and Yahoo this new and highly fluid environment can be a considerable barrier to accessing information from digital libraries and online collections. What is concerning about this is, unless we are careful, people will increasingly see the search results thrown up by Google, Yahoo etc. as the be-all and end-all of a particular area of interest or subject.
Web 2.0 technologies have been seen by many information professionals as critical to the future development of library services. This has led to the use of the term Library 2.0 to denote the kind of service that is envisaged. There has been considerable debate about what Library 2.0 might encompass, but, in the context of information literacy, it can be described as the application of interactive, collaborative, and multimedia technologies to web-based library services and collections.
So in case you haven’t heard Facet have recently published a new book, to which I contributed the School Library 2.0 chapter! 
I’m way behind in reading my RSS feeds – which makes me very glad that RSS actually exists! Imagine if I still had to save all the magazines, books, journals, and newspapers to read when I had time …. like we did in the old days.
choose from. Now I can an ebook with me all the time!!
Some excellent research and commentary is available from BECTA in the UK in the recent publication
judyoconnell.com 