The Information Resources in Arcetri Astrophysics Observatory: Between Metadata and Semantic Web

It is becoming apparent that libraries are going to play a key role in the new W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) paradigm for the semantic web. For this reason, the Arcetri library is investigating methods for publishing different kinds of electronic documents on the net and a way of enriching them with semantic metadata. For the first phase, we are focusing on the library catalogue; and, in a second phase, we will consider bibliographies, preprints, technical reports, web pages, archives of astronomical data, and photographic and historical archives.