Progress in Web-Cataloguing Using Standard Metadata Schemas

Abstract

Web cataloguing’ or ‘metadata creation’ is an effective strategy to enhance the resource- discovery on digital collection that can be accomplished by standard metadata schema. Technological capabilities now allow multiple metadata schemas for discovering web resources. This paper aims to present the progress of web-cataloguing using ‘metadata’ and its impact on precision of search results, in discovering web resources. It also proposes various means of creating metadata in order to pursue with the large databases and/or dynamic web pages. Several metadata initiatives provide glimpses of recent activities on ‘metadata’. Here, an attempt has been made to discuss about different metadata schemas of which Dublin Core (DC) & MAachine Readable Cataloguing (MARC) seem to be widely accepted and used in cataloguing web resources. It also seems imperative to make a few modifications of the existing crosswalk between the DC & MARC-21 elements to be used in conversion of metadata from one into another. This discussion brings out the idea of OAI-PMH to make the metadata available to harvesters and attempts to explore the mechanism of DSpace for exposing metadata in a digital repository.