Book Review: Managing Metadata in Web-scale Discovery Systems

Abstract

Managing metadata in libraries today presents challenges to information professionals concerned with quality control, providing relevant search results, and taming the volume of items available for access in a web-scale discovery system. No longer are libraries limited to the collections they “own.” Catalogers and metadata professionals now assume the responsibility of providing access to millions of resources, often with limitations on who can access that resource. Relationships with vendors provide opportunities to help manage the gargantuan scale of information. Of course those opportunities come with their own problems as relationships among vendors can be contentious, leaving metadata managers to figure out quality control on a grand scale. In addition to this politicized information landscape, new ways of managing and creating metadata are emerging, leaving information professionals with the task of managing multiple schema in different formats. The essays in Managing Metadata in Web-scale Discovery Systems seek to address issues in managing the large scale of information overwhelming catalogers today, with potential solutions for taming the beast of exponentially increasing data.