Concluding Thoughts

All in all, major initiatives are currently being taken to enhance interoperability among the various metadata schemas. Interoperability is a major issue, especially among digital collections, since metadata tends to be stored for use only by the institution that creates and maintains it. Thus, the driving force behind the development of metadata standards in the future will most likely be a desire for uniform access methodology across collections (Smiraglia, 2005). Union catalogs, cross-system searches, crosswalks, and metadata registries each attempt to address and overcome the prevalent barriers to semantic and/or syntactic interoperability. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that some degree of inconsistency or discrepancy shall continue to exist due to the very nature of different institutions creating and using different schemas. As for now, there is still no “one size fits all” universal bibliographic control (Younger, 1997).

References:

Smiraglia, R.P. (Ed.). (2005). Metadata: A cataloger’s primer. New York: The Haworth Information Press.
Younger, J. A. (1997). Resources description in the digital age. Library Trends, 45(3), 462-488. Retrieved July 3, 2008, from InfoTrac OneFile database.