About the presenter:

Priscilla Caplan has been at the Florida Center for Library Automation since Aug. 1999. Previously, she served as Assistant Director for Library Systems, University of Chicago Library, from Aug. 1993-July 1999, and as Head, Systems Development Division, Office for Information Systems, Harvard University Library, from July 1985-July 1993. Her professional activities include being co-chair of the Dublin Core (DC) Standardization Working Group (1999-) and member of the DC Advisory Committee (1998-); chair, National Information Standards Organization (NISO), Standards Development Committee (1997-) and member of the NISO Board of Directors (1998-); Lecturer, Dominican University, School of Library and Information Science (July 1998-July 1999) ; Director, CUIP Digital Library, Chicago Public Schools/University of Chicago Internet Project (Nov. 1997-July 1999); member of the Digital Library Federation, Architecture Committee (1998-1999); and member (1991-1993, 1993-1995 terms) and chair (1995-1996) of MARBI. Caplan has written extensively on metadata and related issues which have been published in The Cybrarian's Manual 2, D-Lib Magazine, Public Access Computer Systems Review, The Serials Librarian, and Cataloging & Classification Quarterly

Summary:

The decade of the 1990s saw the development of a proliferation of metadata element sets for resource description. This paper looks at a subset of these metadata schemes in more detail: the TEI header, EAD, Dublin Core, and VRA Core. It looks at why they developed as they did, major points of difference from traditional (AACR2/MARC) library cataloging, and what advantages they offer to their user communities. It also discusses challenges to implementers of these schemes and possible future developments. It goes on to identify some commonalties among these cases, and to attempt to generalize from these some lessons for developers of metadata element sets. It concludes by suggesting we also look carefully at emerging schemes being developed by publishers in support of electronic commerce and rights management, and think seriously about the implications of commodity metadata upon our traditional bibliographic apparatus.

About the commentator:

Robin Wendler is Metadata Analyst in the Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems (OIS). For the past two years she has worked on the Library Digital Initiative (LDI), a program to develop the infrastructure Harvard libraries need to acquire, manage, deliver, and preserve digital materials as systematically as other formats. She advises on the design of widely diverse kinds of metadata both to the LDI development team and to project managers developing digital content. Recent projects have focused on administrative metadata for digital audio, digital repository metadata, and visual resource cataloging.

From 1989-1998 she was the Bibliographic Analyst in OIS, providing functional analysis on the use of MARC formats in Harvard's local integrated library system, the import and export of cataloging data, and the specification of technical services functions. Prior to coming to Harvard in 1988, she was an original cataloger for art and architecture at the University of Maryland, College Park.

She currently sits on the RLIN Database Advisory Group and the CC:DA Task Force on the VRA Core Categories. Other professional activities have included MARBI (1995-1999), Co-chair of the ALCTS/LITA institute "Managing Metadata for the Digital Library: Crosswalks or Chaos" (1998), Digital Library Federation Task Force on Metadata (chair, 1997), consulting on MARC formats for a library systems vendor and on multilingual thesauri for a European library consortium.