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Domain specific
metadata has been developed to cater for the specific
requirements of particular areas, for example:
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Archives commonly
use EAD or Encoded Archival Description or
ISAD(G) the General
International Standard Archival Description. See the Diffuse
website for more information on archiving standards.
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Museums - CIMI is
an international consortium of cultural heritage institutions
working together to encourage the development and application of
standards to museum information. See the Diffuse website for
more information on museum standards.
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Government – GILS
or Government Information Locator Service/Global Information
Locator is widely used for government information although
recently many governments seem to be moving to Dublin Core in
preference. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) has
established a Government Working Group. Many governments, eg UK,
Australia, Canada, USA, Denmark have produced guidelines which
may be mandatory on public sector organisations, including
libraries. (See the e-gif (Electronic Government Interoperability
Framework) and e-gms (Electronic Government Metadata
Standard)
produced by the e-Envoy’s Office in the
UK). The first version of
the e-gms was based on simple Dublin Core whilst the second
moved to qualified Dublin Core with some additional document
management elements.
Collection Level
Descriptions
In large collaborative projects it may also be necessary to
consider the use of collection level description metadata to
describe the holdings of participating libraries (scope, level,
depth, language etc.). See, for example, the UKOLN Collection
Description Focus for information on the use of CLDs in the UK
Higher and Further education sector and NOF guidelines for an
example of their adoption by public library funding bodies.
Controlled vocabularies and
thesauri
Metadata is only half of the solution. If users are to be
able to carry out useful searches across distributed data sets
then the producers of those data sets need to be entering values
into the metadata elements in a consistent way. To do this they
need to adopt and use some sort of identifiable encoding schemes
or controlled vocabularies for indexing. A good example is the
Library of Congress Subject Headings.
A thesaurus is a controlled vocabulary where the terms are
arranged in hierarchies which show relationships such as broader
or narrower terms, equivalence or part equivalence, and where
terms are designated preferred terms or non-preferred terms (for
synonym control). They also typically include scope notes and
other useful information. There are two ISO standards for
thesauri: ISO 2788, 1986 Guide to establishment and development
of monolingual thesauri; and ISO 5964, 1985 Guide to the
establishment and development of multi-lingual thesauri.
The Getty Museum site makes available a number of thesauri
including: The Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus and the
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic
Names. Traugott Koch has complied
a good list of controlled vocabularies, thesauri and
classification schemes
Unique identifiers
In order to be findable on the web each resource has to have a
unique identifier or address, such as a URL (Uniform Resource
Locator). The problem with URLs as every web user will know, is
that the URL for any given resource is likely to change or move
over time, making information retrieval difficult. The DOI
(Digital Object Identifier) is a persistent identifier which
overcomes this problem. Paul Miller has written an easy to
understand article explaining about unique identifiers.
GOOD PRACTICE GUIDELINES: RESOURCE DISCOVERY AND RETRIEVAL
Search engines
The library catalogue is the key to the holdings of an
individual library. However, many if not most, libraries offer
Internet access to their users. They need to find ways to help
open up these networked resources for their users. The easiest
way for libraries to do this is simply to point users to one of
the many search engines available.
They are of the
following types:
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Free text search
engines which search for keywords e.g. Altavista,
Google.
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Index/directory
based search engines in which the user works his way through a
series of menus continually narrowing his search e.g. Yahoo.
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Meta/Multi
search-engines which run one search on more than one search
engine e.g. ixquick.
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Natural language
search engines in which the search can be entered as a question
e.g. Ask Jeeves.
For a comprehensive
list of search engines of all kinds and more information about
search engines see www.philb.com
and http://searchenginewatch.com.
These sites give information about searching the web, analysis
of the search engine industry and help to site-owners trying to
improve their abilities to be found on the web.
Lists of recommended
sites
Libraries might consider assisting their users further through
the creation of lists of useful websites. Typically these will
have been assessed against some sort of quality criteria (the
Desire project created a useful assessment) and will often be
categorised by subject. RDN (Resource Discovery Network) is a
good example of this). However, maintaining and updating such a
list can be time consuming. Libraries may wish to consider
co-operating with one another in the creation and maintenance of
such lists. CORC, the Co-operative Online Resource Catalog
Service, from OCLC is a good example of a co-operative
initiative for the creation of descriptions of webpages. (see
also portals)
Gateways and portals
The distinction between gateways and portals is rather blurred
but typically a gateway will consist of sets of annotated links
to other websites which have been vetted by the compilers of the
gateway. The user may be presented with a series of menus which
take them from general terms to more specific terms. Such sites
are enormously useful to the researcher as they save the work of
looking at web site after web site on a particular subject in
search of one or two which are of decent quality. Portals
generally aim to deliver services to their users in addition to
the sets of links. For example they may provide online
transaction services of various sorts, online shopping etc. They
may also support searching across the contents of the sites they
link to in an integrated fashion.
It is not possible to list all gateways but the following are
examples:
Specialised
software to support the development and maintenance of subject
gateways is available, for example, ROADS (Resource Organisation
and Discovery in Subject based services). Commercial companies
also offer portal software, e.g. Vignette,
SAP Portal, Plumtree
etc. Some libraries are beginning to set up their own gateways
and portals – for example to support ‘clumps,’ community
information services and provide learning support.
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