Carol Hutchins
carol.hutchins@nyu.edu

One area which was taken up in some detail at the MSRI "Future of Math Communication" back last November is metadata for mathematical materials which are part of digital libraries. I'm sorry to have given it short shrift in the conference summary I provided. In the present column, I won't pretend to give it a comprehensive overview. Certainly I have not followed in great detail all these developments among the various scientific communities who are working on metadata definitions of specific relevance to them. What follows are simply some pointers, and some questions, which we might find worth exploring.

Recently, we saw a notice that the well-known website, Math Forum (forum.swarthmore.edu) has been sold to WebCT, an online learning dot-com. I don't know whether that is good or bad in the long run. However, it does seem that a worthy service that the Forum offers, will now have a sold stream of revenue behind it. What does this have to do with metadata? Well, by coincidence I decided to contact Prof. Robby Robson (Oregon State University), one of the persons who spoke about metadata at MSRI, who also knows a great deal about WebCT and similar firms.

While I doubt that I can effectively summarize in a short space the scene on metadata development, I wish to call attention to Prof. Robson's web page (http://ucs.orst.edu/~robsonr/) which has a link to the presentation he gave at MSRI. An IEEE committee, among other entities, is developing classification schemes for Learning Object Metadata. While this sounds like it would be restricted to pedagogical material for K-12, Robson tells me that it really could apply to any scholarly metadata. He asked me "where are librarians in all this?" Namely, he is wondering why librarians are not participating more in this, and maybe in digital library developments overall. That's an interesting question that perhaps our group might discuss a bit informally during SLA. Other projects worth pondering in relation to Learning Object Metadata are the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Math and Science Education (http://www.enc.org) and SMETE, explained at http://www.dlib.org/smete.

I am left with more questions than answers when I ponder all these initialisms and web sites. I see practical problems in libraries. For instance, I'm sure you've experienced as one of the most difficult encounters in reference, how to help people find mathematical materials (usually print of course) at the appropriate level to their need. Our library catalogs do not attempt to index or classify material according to level of difficulty. (I use math as a good example, but the problem applies to other subjects too.) I wonder about the time spent on all these theoretical metadata efforts, when a good action-oriented project might be simply to put the Telegraphic Reviews of the American Math Monthly online in a database searchable by subject and level. Such a database would benefit not only students but also faculty when they are looking for appropriate textbooks.

Do you agree that the call for interaction between subject specialist librarians and community-of-practice metadata projects needs some kind of response? If so, what might that be?