Metadata and Bibliographic Control: Soul-Mates or Two Solitudes?

The historical interweaving of evolving trends and applications in metadata and bibliographic control seems largely absent from the literature. To address this apparent gap in perspective, some historic and more recent developments related to each are traced, along with some speculation about future directions. Cataloguing rules are ancestors to the current lineage of bibliographic standards. Metadata schemas have been developed to meet the needs of particular fields or domains and to support a variety of functions related to resource discovery. While differences between the tools of bibliographic control and of metadata application still remain, the similarities have become sufficient to warrant a confluence in terminology and definition. While internationally determined codes and standards have fostered the goal of universal bibliographic control, syntactic structures, semantic element sets, transmission protocols, cross-schema mappings, and metadata harvesting tools have been instrumental to realizing the concept of interoperability. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]