Branching Out: Cataloging Skills and Functions in the Digital Age

Librarians ereate metadata including cataloging to manage and provide access to collections. Two recent technological developments, the explosion in electronic publishing and the conversion of metadata previously unavailable online into machine-readable form, are providing challenges to cataloging. Disparate types of resources, such as images and museum objects, archives, and library collections in print and electronic form, must be brought together in a coherent information environment. While catalogers exclusively cannot do these tasks, they and their skills are essential to bring order out of the chaos of the many different access systems.