The metadata challenge: promoting discovery, access, and usability for online books

Abstract

With millions of books, serials, and other documents now digitized, rich troves of information and culture can now be made available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. But these riches are worthless if they cannot be found, accessed, and effectively used by the readers who need them. The key to unlock these treasures is metadata. Networked computing enables techniques for making metadata more effective than ever; yet in practice, online collections all too often either do not have or do not take full advantage of the best metadata they could use.