Book Reviews
Douglas King, Column Editor
Metadata and its Applications in the Digital Library:
Approaches and Practices
By Jia Liu
Metadata is one of the hottest topics of conversation among catalogers right now, and there is no shortage of articles and books on the subject. Some focus on theory, some on current developments in the field, some on building projects from scratch. Jia Liu’s Metadata and its Applications in the Digital Library : Approaches and Practices draws from all of these approaches over its 163 page of text. Would any book be able to comprehensively cover all aspects of metadata in such a short space? Probably not.
Metadata and its Applications in the Digital Library is divided into two parts: "Metadata in General" (4 chapters, totaling 130 pages) and "Metadata Projects and Their Applications in the Digital Library" (2 chapters, 33 pages). The demarcation between the two sections is not as clear as the titles might lead one to believe. Virtually every example in the first section is taken from a digital library, and its fourth chapter is even titled "Metadata Implementation". The second section is a collection of short metadata case studies, including discussions of BIBLINK, MetaLib, MetaWeb, Nordic Metadata Project, PANDORA, The Oxford Digital Library, DSpace, and the Peking University Rare Book Digital Library. In both sections, the organization seemed counterintuitive. Metadata and digital libraries go together like AACR2r and MARC 21, so why attempt to separate the two topics in this artificial way?
Liu’s main argument is that metadata is the inevitable agent of much-needed change. Traditional cataloging has both strong points (controlled vocabularies, international standardization, and educated practitioners) and weak ones (an elderly data format, byzantine encoding standards, and format biases). However, users and librarians would both benefit from records that included not just descriptive information, but also administrative information, preservation information, and technical information. Liu believes that the answer to this will be METS, an XML schema language developed by the Library of Congress in 2003 as an initiative of The Digital Library Federation. Whatever metadata standard emerges will eventually replace AACR2r and MARC 21, which are unsuited for describing constantly changing digital resources in a dynamic, networked environment (a.k.a. digital library). It will be a bloodless coup, though, as call numbers, LCSH, and authority records will continue to be assigned by actual human beings.
It is difficult to argue with Liu’s conclusions, but Metadata and its Applications in the Digital Library could have easily been several different books. It could be as many as five books-- an abstract introduction to metadata (focusing on theory), a technical introduction to metadata (focusing on encoding), a practical introduction to metadata (focusing on implementation), successful metadata projects, and metadata in digital libraries. And I am not even counting topics barely mentioned in passing, such as metadata crosswalks and converters, the pros and cons of custom-designed metadata schema, IPR (intellectual property rights) metadata, application profiles, metadata registries, and machine-generated metadata. Each of these deserves its own article, at least.
The book shows that Liu has an impressive knowledge of cutting-edge developments in metadata, but her information about traditional cataloging is laughably outdated. For example, I was surprised to hear that "AACR3, the latest edition of AACR, will be published by the end of 2005" (p. 19). Also, Liu cites extensively from APPM (Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts : a Cataloging Manual for Archival Repositories, Historical Societies, and Manuscript Libraries, last published in 1989), but makes no mention of DACS (Describing Archives : a Content Standard), which superseded it in 2004. And this is to say nothing of the abundance of outdated statistics or the frequent typographical errors, both of which are far too numerous for such a slim volume.
In short, I cannot recommend Metadata and its Applications in the Digital Library : Approaches and Practices. It does not have enough technical data for full-time metadata librarians (much less computer scientists), and it is too episodic for catalogers looking for an introduction to metadata. Thankfully, there are over 1500 items in WorldCat having something to do with metadata, so one can afford to be choosy.
Published in 2007 by Libraries Unlimited of Westport, Connecticut. (xx, 192 p.) ISBN13: 978-1-59158-306-6 (alk. paper; $40.00).
Reviewed by: Richard N. Leigh
AV Cataloger
McKeldin Library
University of Maryland
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Last updated: March 21, 2008
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