Options for Organizing Electronic Resources: The Coexistence of Metadata

Abstract

With the rapid growth in the number of electronic resources available via the Internet, a variety of methods have been developed to organize and access these objects. Considering that the Internet has always been a decentralized initiative, it is not surprising that the efforts to organize it have been similarly independent and uncoordinated. The current organization of electronic resources can be described at two levels: the local agency's catalog and catalogs of Internet resources beyond the auspices of any one library. Scholars in the area of humanities computing concentrated on the electronic document itself and on a project to develop a text encoding scheme for complex electronic textual objects. The project became known as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Computer engineers realized they had to develop retrieval systems that could be mastered easily by the non-scientific community that now used the Internet so heavily. Their efforts resulted in three primary access methods: direct address, directory browsing lists and robot-generated searchable indexes. Now the goal should be the creation of a third level access tool - the metacatalog - which should be able to access all relevant information seamlessly, no matter what format or language.