Machine-assisted Metadata Generation and New Resource Discovery: Software and Services

Research and other libraries are priceless given that they hold, organize and provide sensible, generally open, access to many of the treasures of knowledge of our species. Especially when mass media, popular culture and/or governmental information flows fail in making available the objective and relevant information needed to enable us to make informed decisions about our lives, businesses or planet, libraries usually will provide the information needed. As both a first and last refuge for knowledge, libraries could come to play an increasingly expansive and critical role in society, given this need, if we can develop and better keep pace with the expanding role of technology in scholarly and educational communication and information access. Librarians and the technological directions we choose to develop and/or follow are more important, on a societal scale, than most us think. Libraries and related services are not inexpensive to develop and maintain, though, and, with the information boom that both preceded (in print resources) and continues to follow the advent of the Web (in both print and digital resources), are not keeping up with the large numbers of significant information resources being produced. Therefore an important contribution to help enable libraries work better and have more impact on a more expansive scale is the development and judicious use of machine–assistance related software, technologies and services which amplify collection building expertise in library collection building. Discussed in this article are two projects in this area