Organization, Description and Representation of Information:
Challenges/Opportunities

Karen M. Drabenstott and David M. Levy

Challenges/opportunities

1. To develop methods for cataloging digital artifacts which achieve a workable balance between automation and human intervention. In our rush to embrace machine methods, we need to identify which aspects of cataloging machines do well, and which tasks require (what kinds of) human intervention.
2. To develop collection-level representations for digital-library collections. What sorts of collection-level descriptions would be most useful to users and what methods and standards would be needed to realize them?
3. To integrate digital and non-digital materials. In our concern to find ways to organize, describe, and represent digital materials, let's not forget that the challenge of integrating non-digital materials (paper, film, microfiche, etc.) with digital materials is of equal importance.
4. How to organize and represent rapidly changing material; how to deal with multiple versions. What sorts of schemes must be developed to keep surrogates and other descriptions of rapidly changing digital materials up-to-date; to represent and describe multiple versions of "the same" item or work?
5. To develop schemes for representing the relationships among digital materials. One way to deal with multiple versions and rapidly changing material may be to develop (partly) automated means to represent relationships among digital items, in order, for example, to indicate how one item differs from another.
6. To develop methods for moving meta-data between different encoding schemes. Since it is unlikely that there will ever be a single representation for meta-data (any more than there is or will be a single representation for data), it will be important to find ways to achieve interoperability across different meta-data schemes.