Through this work we would like to demonstrate how both the vertical barriers and horizontal barriers to interoperability can be reduced, thereby (1) allowing haystack-like solutions to span the individual, community, and institutional paradigms and (2) enabling agent and end-user services to draw upon assets, schemas and metadata created and maintained in any of those domains. To ensure that the work remains grounded, we propose to conduct the work using libraries as an exemplar domain. This section describes the domain-specific challenges and opportunities in doing so.
To move forward libraries require a user interface that can provide a window into descriptions of information resources from a wide variety of sources.
This interface must effectively expose to humans the relevant parts of an information substrate that exhibits the following characteristics:
- descriptions of information assets can come from a wide variety of sources
- new information assets can easily be added
- community-specific ways of talking about assets (schemas) can be added
-
communities and libraries an decide – and change their minds –
about whether the designated “home” for their assets and/or their descriptions
is in institutional/enterprise-controlled systems (e.g. library), or in
community-controlled systems
We would like to be able to support arbitrary metadata schemas for library collections that are domain or discipline-based in addition to those that are library standards-based. Initially these could resemble traditional schemas such as Dublin Core metadata, but should eventually include much more complex schemas which allow for structures such as hierarchies and groupings (whole part, or parent child).
We would like to be able to support the flexible evolution of domain-based metadata schemas. Libraries could control the evolution of their standardized schemas to limit the impact of these changes on their practices and systems. But domain-based metadata changes rapidly and this should be supported since it allows metadata to reflect the real thinking of the domain rather than arbitrary abstractions of it.
We would like to be able to support arbitrary, ad hoc annotations to metadata schemas and instance metadata. These could be supplied by information consumers directly, by external domain experts, by collections managers, or by automated techniques such as collection data mining.
We need to be able to work with an increasing number of third party service providers, both of digital content and of metadata about that content. Traditionally libraries has control of the descriptive metadata that was produced about their collections, but it is becoming increasingly true that metadata is generated from beyond libraries: either by authors themselves or by service bureaus such as publishers or production labs. This is especially true for technical metadata about digital objects, and this metadata should be kept and used if at all possible.
We would like to be able to store digital content with
persistence and some assurance that this content will still be accessible
and usable in the future. This is more difficult for digital content than for
traditional analog resources. To
preserve digital assets, (1) the bits themselves must be stored and
retrievable, (2) the format and representation of the bits must also be stored and retrievable, so that the bits
themselves can have meaning when retrieved in the future, and (3) the stored
information must be fulfillable using off-ramp devices or appliances available
in the future. Meeting these challenges
will require the creation of new metadata schemas to describe the attributes
and properties of the digital objects.
Note that libraries themselves form a community that generate domain-specific schemas, the use of which help libraries succeed in their mission. For example, much research remains to be done in the field of digital preservation; schemas supporting digital preservation are not yet mature, but libraries continue to develop them and we expect that much metadata will be sourced by libraries about existing assets as they represent and lead the digital preservation community.
Provide a unified, customizable search interface to all libraries assets that is easy for humans and librarians to use. In this new digital domain, libraries would ideally offer “One Stop Shopping” to all information resources of interest to its consitituents, and act as a flexible “information clearinghouse”.
This interface could provide access to the richness of community-specific schemas and metadata (where they exist), while also providing good general interdisciplinary recall across all items. The interface would provide access to items held “within” the library, as well as to external items to which the library has negotiated access, and would be configurable by individuals and communities to emphasize and optimize the presentation of assets and metadata that are prominent within their community.
Provide access to new external resources, as they are identified as being of interest to the libraries’ constitutents. Note that identification of interest could happen by the library itself, by communities, by individual patrons, or some blend of all of these.