Viewing description through different lenses

One of the really intriguing aspects about this current semester has been the opportunity to view the description of information resources through the differing perspectives of three different classes. Cataloging, Metadata, and Archival Arrangement and Description may come at the process of resource description from different motivations and viewpoints, but are all ultimately concerned with identifying what a resource is, and enabling its access by outside users.

Cataloging is the most technical and complex of the three courses. It is in some ways the most traditional descriptive process of the field, carrying on the legacy of inventorying, classification, and ordering that has been a hallmark of libraries for centuries. Though having undergone a significant, recent change in the cataloging rules that now guide the practice, cataloging's attachment to the MARC standard keep it a relatively formulaic and predictable practice. Employment of cataloging processes requires an understanding of specific tag locations, subfields, indicators, and an understanding of specific content standards and data entry formats. While a knowledge of these protocols and features can make cataloging a relatively more difficult, or time-consuming, description method, it also tends to produce catalogs and indexes that are relatively cohesive and consistent, resulting in relatively accurate searches. Though the new RDA cataloging rules place more focus on the relationships between information resources, cataloging has traditionally focused on description of single items.

Archival description, on the other hand, has tended to be a bit more flexible, conceptually. Having undergone cycles of emphasis which included: simple inventories, item-level descriptions, to the more common collection-level finding aids, archival description has tended to focus on how to adequately identify and provide access to aggregations and collections of resources, rather than single items. For archival purposes, data such as the context of creation, provenance, and function for information resources has often outweighed their content in importance, as well as the relationship of those resources to each other and the collection as a whole. While archival description has codified its practices in standards semi-derived from the world of library cataloging, there is more flexibility in how they tend to be implemented. Like library cataloging, the ascendancy of digital documents and information resources will signal some pretty significant changes to archival descriptive practices in the future.

As for Metadata, well, in many ways it is a concept that encompasses both of the others. In a very general way, metadata is the essence of what library cataloging and archival description are about, but in another sense, it represents part of the future for both practices. Digital metadata bears the advantage of not being bound to specific encoding standards, content standards, or software platforms, making it an incredibly flexible and simple tool to utilize. By the same token, it can be made as rigorous and specific in its scope as a user or corporate entity desires, thereby retaining the degree of control and consistency that one would expect to find in a library catalog, for instance. Features such as the ability to easily link data or images make it especially valuable to archives and special collections, providing users the ability to visually explore the relationships between items, rather than hunt for them in stored boxes.

Despite the obvious advantages, however, the big question mark is whether institutions will buy into a collective metadata system (e.g. the Semantic Web) in the same way that they have for MARC and linked cataloging. Can libraries make the big jump from MARC and corporate catalogs to a shared, centralized metadata system? Can it similarly interlink the holdings and records of archives and special collections? Interesting times ahead seeking out the answers to these questions, that's for sure.