Metadata are crucial for discovery and access by providing contextual, technical, and administrative information in a standard form. Yet metadata are also sites of tension between sociocultural representations, resource constraints, and standardized systems. Formal and informal interventions may be interpreted as quality issues, political acts to…

Discovery of digital items by scholars and the public is highly dependent upon effective metadata to ensure inclusion and prioritization in search engines. Subject descriptions based on controlled vocabulary, such as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH), are particularly useful to enhance discovery, but they may be expensive to provide. In…

Explores the need for analytical indexes to access Internet resources. Considers bibliographic control, Web site design, keyword search engines, hierarchical subject indexes, and special indexes and compilations of links, and concludes that the creation of small, focused indexes may be the best solution for accessing specific types of digital…

The 25 most popular free scholarly electronic journal titles, determined by number of holding institutions on OCLC, were searched on a random sample of library World Wide Web sites and catalogs to provide a separate gauge for access levels provided by institutions. Access levels were fairly low and decreased dramatically with size of the…