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April 29, 2006

Digital Libraries and Metadata

In 1999, Marchionini & Fox published an article titled Progress toward digital libraries: Augmentation through integration in the Journal for Information Processing & Management. The authors lay out four dimensions of design space: technology, content, services, and community. Seems to me that we have progressed enough in the metadata and IA space that all four are not only possible but a requirement for doing business.

Because information is a basic human need, and libraries have evolved into an important institution to help communities of humans communicate in spite of differences in time and space, one key dimension of the design space is labeled “community” and reflects social, economic, political, legal, and cultural issues. This dimension includes the needs, information-seeking behaviors, and attitudes of the individuals within a community. This dimension is exceedingly complex and has to date received the least amount of attention.

Technology serves as an engine pushing the field, leading to continual shifts in solutions that coalesce around what is necessary, desirable, and feasible. DL researchers have leveraged technical progress in networking, storage and retrieval, multimedia representation, and user interface design to link people to DLs and DLs to each other.

Services reflect the functionality afforded by systems serving the community of users. Access services that facilitate search and browsing have been central to DL research thus far, but there is great need for attention to reference and question answering, on-demand help and fostering of citizenship and literacy, and mechanisms to simplify participatory involvement of user communities (e.g., contributions of time and materials).

Content is often what one thinks of first in a library – books, journals, maps, art, music, and innumerable other forms and genres of expression that may have representations either outside computers, inside them, or in both versions. DL research has made good advances in digitization and representing content, and considerable work is underway to leverage metadata to transparently connect people to content in different DLs.

Technology, Content, Services and Community are emerging under different terms such as Information Architecture, Content Management, Knowledge Management, Web Services, Collaboration, and many others.

Posted by Todd at April 29, 2006 5:59 PM