http://www.oclc.org/us/en/nextspace/015/1.htm 

"For hundreds of years, metadata was kept in a box. Literally. A wooden box, filled with paper cards. Libraries cataloged for one reason: to be able to find resources on a shelf. Today, though, we're seeing a growing importance placed on metadata management activities. In an increasingly information-driven world, good metadata is the key to more than finding the right item."

"Data-about-data is now used to track materials, assess needs, compare collections, inform research, manage workflows, plan budgets and even make friends. Catalogers have been joined by publishers, retail outlets, shipping companies, researchers, faculty, Web programmers, search engine optimizers and end users in the flow of metadata creation and modification. This puts libraries, and catalogers, right in the middle of a revolution in how we think about representing and describing information. And the more partners we can involve in these processes, the more chances libraries have to add value up and down a variety of data supply chains."

EXCERPTS below:

"Preventing blindness is Dr. John Michon's passion. As a practicing ophthalmologist and a medical researcher, he has studied and seen firsthand the devastating effects of eye disease."

"And he knows that to eradicate vision loss, the clinical record of patient care must be linked online with the huge datasets emerging from gene-mapping projects and other research activities in order to create new associations and new knowledge that doctors can act upon."

"That's where librarians come in, he says."

"The role of library and other information scientists is crucial to the success of this effort," Dr. Michon says. "Physicians, allied health workers and researchers are generally naïve when it comes to classification and categorization issues. We're too busy with our primary duties. Creating, implementing and testing knowledge models for the large and diverse number of biomedical domains will be a cooperative process between librarians and domain experts."

"Dr. Michon's thoughts highlight a trend sweeping across the information community as people and communities are deluged with digital data: the growing importance of metadata and the critical role librarians are playing in making information systems better. Of course, the importance of knowledge organization models and standardized description are nothing new to our profession. Librarians have long been leaders in designing classification systems, dating back to 1876, when Melvil Dewey first published the Dewey Decimal Classification system." ...

Another EXCERPT below:

"In her paper Time Horizon 2020: Library Renaissance, Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost and Dean, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester, talks about how the coming decade will mark the renaissance of technical services and a complete transformation of collection development.

Among the changes she sees:

"The emphasis of technical services will change from the acquisition of content to the user's discovery of content. A library's success will be defined by whether its users are finding the best materials easily and quickly, rather than by collection metrics. A myriad of services, customized to the library's local needs, will emerge that will sit on top of a library's broad print and electronic collections. The success of these services will be dependent upon the availability and quality of metadata."

"The need for all content to have some online manifestation, whether a full-text scan or a metadata record, will force all of a library's hidden collections into the light, including manuscripts, images and other special collections."

"Dissertations, articles, books, working papers, technical reports and other such content will flood into the campus libraries for curation, description and distribution. Technical service staff will find an increasing percentage of their work shifted away from the procurement of external content to the care and distribution of locally created content."

"The Google Book Project will cause a resurgence in the use of the print collections. As books are rediscovered, there will be a shift of resources toward identifying, preserving and republishing books held uniquely by each library."

"The year 2020 will still find libraries creating, collecting, organizing, delivering and preserving information resources; the fundamental "what" of technical services and library collections will not change," Susan says. "However, we must be ready for a radical transformation in the `how' and `why' of these activities. I believe the focus will shift from external to internal content, from just-in-case to just-in-time collection development, and from disparate silos of information resources to a mandated expectation that those silos can communicate and interact in ways that meet the expectations of library users."...

and another EXCERPT:

"People are getting wind of the fact that librarians are the experts," she says. "There are a lot of partnerships being formed and people are looking to librarians for information standards and how to manage data. Never in our time has there been a more universal interest in producing structured, standardized information."

"Jane was approached by researchers from evolutionary biology who were building a digital repository called Dryad to archive data and publish findings in evolutionary biology, ecology and related fields. The repository allows scientists to access and build on each other's findings."

"They asked me if I knew anything about the MARC format and Dublin Core," she says. "In fact, they said they needed bibliographic control. These biologists actually used the words bibliographic control. It was pretty amazing!" ...         EXCERPTS