Digital Commons Network^™

The Metadata Challenge: Promoting Discovery, Access, And Usability For Online Books, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

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.

There is much ongoing work harnessing …

The Next Mother Lode For Large-Scale Digitization? Historic Serials, Copyrights, And Shared Knowledge, John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom

Much of the publicity around recent mass-digitization projects focuses on the millions of books they promise to make freely readable online. Because of copyright, though, most of the books provided in full will be of mainly historical interest. But much of the richest historical text content is not in books at all, but in the newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and scholarly journals where events are reported firsthand, stories and essays make their debut, research findings are announced and critiqued, and issues of the day debated. Back runs of many of these serials are available in major research institutions but often in …