While reading Anne Gilliland's introductory piece on metadata, I started to think about two "problems" that currently exist in library-land.
First, some metadata schemes like MARC or EAD are " . . . complex, time consuming, and resource intensive, and may only be justifiable when there is a legal mandate[.]" This reminded me of the fact that, at my present library, in order for books or digital materials to be enumerated in our collection, we are required to buy the MARC records. This affects us, because the number of books we have also affects our institution's academic ranking. This also reminded me that, on the Internet, one often must pay a certain fee to Google in order to appear on the first page of search results.
I wonder whether the next grand step for librarianship is to champion discoverability as a mandate that is just as important as access. In fact, the two go hand-in-hand; it does no good for a patron to have access if s/he cannot discover anything. And if there are wealth barriers which libraries must jump over to make their items discoverable, then perhaps we should break them, just as we (or at least some of us) championed OA on the principle of universal access.
Which of course brings us to Dublin Core, which is OA, but does not seem to be multilingual. In order to fully discover stuff, and maximize the flattening of distance technology affords, we need an interoperable multilingual metadata scheme. The problem then becomes such a scheme would cost money. However, I wonder whether we can upload videos to educate savvy patrons on how to craft sophisticated folksonomies. The scheme should be OS as well.
This would not necessarily put OCLC's new endeavor out of business! We as librarians should support hybrid OS & private business endeavors. However, we should get the source code out there so that innovative information professionals anywhere can eliminate the language barrier without charging a fee.
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