Special Collections in ARL Libraries: Results of the 1998 Survey Sponsored by the ARL Research Collections Committee
by Judith M. Panitch, 2001

"Metadata is often called "data about data." It has been used by various communities creating geospatial data, social and scientific data sets, enterprise applications, data warehouses, educational resources, and bibliographic data. In the traditional library world, catalog records are metadata, as they contain information about the library's collection of "data," i.e., the books and journals that make up its collections. Increasingly, libraries have been adopting emerging metadata standards such as Dublin Core, EAD, MODS, and TEI to describe, discover, preserve, manage, and provide access to electronic resources and digital objects.

This SPEC survey investigated how metadata is implemented in ARL member libraries: which staff are creating metadata and for what kinds of digital objects, what schemas and tools they use to create and manage metadata, what skills metadata staff need and how they acquire them, and the organizational changes and challenges that metadata has brought to libraries."

Discusses "U of Chicago initiatives related to "uncovering hidden collections," leveraging cooperative collection development and faculty partnerships"

"In Google's Broad Wake: Taking Responsibility for Shaping the Global Digital Library," by Richard K. Johnson, brings together a number of articulations of core library interests in digitization partnerships, identifies six key interests against which potential agreements should be evaluated, and urges libraries and their institutions to "make full use of whatever leverage they have to ensure the global digital library is open and dynamic."