Chapter 3: Resources

Abstract

The rise of a new information environment—the World Wide Web—has revealed the downside of the long history that libraries have with metadata. The question that we must face, and that we must face sooner rather than later, is how we can best transform our data so that it can become part of the dominant information environment that is the Web. This issue of “Library Technology Reports” examines how this transformation can occur, and what can be done to help facilitate it.

The movement of library data into the linked data cloud is not as far off as it might seem. Like the scientific databases, the metadata already exists and is in a data format. Some transformation of the data to a format compatible with the semantic Web will be necessary, but the encoding that has already been done (mainly in the MARC format) and the degree of vocabulary control that exists facilitate the transformation. It truly is a matter of transformation, at least in a first step. After that, the only limits are those of the imagination of information seekers all over the globe.