Abstract

This chapter of "Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata" explores the history of library data and where it stands in a modern context. The rise of a new information environment--the World Wide Web--has revealed the downside of the long history that libraries have with metadata. The question that we must face, and that we must face sooner rather than later, is how we can best transform our data so that it can become part of the dominant information environment that is the Web.

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The larger the library is, the more you must distinguish the books from each other, and consequently the more fully and more accurately you must catalogue them... When I come to a great and national library, where I have the editions or works of "Abelard," I have a right to find those editions and works so well distinguished from each other that I may get exactly the particular one which I want.

--Sir Anthony Panizzi (1)

We can trace the origins of modern library cataloging practice back to the 1830s and Anthony Panizzi's 91 rules. Panizzi's singular insight was that a large catalog needed consistency in its entries if it was to serve the user. The years that followed brought waves of change that transformed the world socially, technologically, and intellectually. These changes were matched by a related evolution of libraries and library catalogs. The card catalog came about at the time of the industrial revolution, which was marked by a great increase in the production of printed materials. The true mechanization of the catalog was not possible until much more recent times, when advanced computer technology allowed the creation of the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) in the 1980s. Some might say that the term OPAC already sounds quaint to the ears of twenty-first-century librarians.

With each era, conceptual changes to the catalog have come in response to related changes in the catalog's context. Some changes in cataloging rules have addressed the new types of material that libraries must catalog, for instance, the changes that came with the emergence of recorded sound and films. Changes in the workflow of cataloging have been necessary to respond to the increased production of information resources. Technology itself has offered opportunities for change.

If there is one constant, it is that throughout these nearly two centuries, the modern library has continually transformed itself in an effort to respond to the needs of its contemporary user.

Today, we face another significant time of change that is being prompted by today's library user. This user no longer visits the physical library as his primary source of information, but seeks and creates information while connected to the global computer network. The change that libraries will need to make in response must include the transformation of the library's public catalog from a stand-alone database of bibliographic records to a highly hyperlinked data set that can interact with information resources on the World Wide Web. The library data can then be integrated...