Digital libraries have, in the main, adopted the traditional library notion of the metadata "record"as the basic unit of management and exchange. Although this simplifies the harvest and re-exposure of metadata, it limits the ability of metadata aggregators to improve the quality of metadata and to share specifics of those improvements with others. The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is exploring options for augmenting harvested metadata and re-exposing the augmented metadata to downstream users with detailed information on how it was created and by whom. The key to this augmentation process involves changing the basic metadata unit from "record" to "statement."
In addition to this fundamental re-examination of a key component of metadata aggregation, NSDL is considering how metadata improvement services might be optimized to serve the growing cohort of digitial libraries. As part of their work with INFOMINE/iVia, the NSDL has developed a model of service interaction that enables loosely-coupled third party services to provide metadata enhancements to a central repository, with interactions orchestrated by a centralized software application.
Diane Hillmann is Director of Library Services and Operations for the NSDL. In her previous life, she was Authorities Librarian and managed the [former] Technical Services Support Unit (authorities, import/export, catalog maintenance) at CUL. She has been involved with standards development (MARC and Dublin Core), and is currently a member of the DC Advisory Board and Usage Board, edits "Using Dublin Core" and manages the AskDCMI Service.
Naomi Dushay is a research programmer/analyst for the National Science Digital Library. She is currently refactoring the NSDL Search Service, and is also engaged in building visual browse interfaces to the NSDL data. She has been doing digital library research since 1997, contributing to projects such as NCSTRL, Fedora, and PRISM (DLI-2). She was a member of the CU library department currently known as DLIT from 1991-1997.
Jon Phipps has been a member of the technical staff at the National Science Digital Library since 2001. His current responsibilities include development of the various systems managing Collection Registration, metadata harvest/ingest, and Resource Recommendation. He led the team that created the initial requirements and developed the architecture of the NSDL Metadata Repository and related systems. Before joining Cornell and the NSDL, he was Manager of Software Development at knovel.com where he helped develop the data storage and search infrastructure to support their online engineering library. In what now seems to him like a former life, he was an independent business analyst and consultant helping companies setup and manage multi-platform publishing systems, Vice-President and General Manager of Niles & Phipps Lithographers, and owner of The TypePeople -- an advertising typographer.
