As an increasing number of digital library projects embrace the harvesting of item-level descriptive metadata, issues of description granularity and concerns about potential loss of context when harvesting item-level metadata take on greater significance. Collection-level description can provide valuable context for item-level metadata records harvested from disparate and heterogeneous providers. This paper describes an ongoing experiment using collection-level description in concert with item-level metadata to improve quality of search and discovery across an aggregation of metadata describing resources held by a consortium of large academic research libraries. We present details of approaches implemented so far and preliminary analyses of the potential utility of these approaches. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of related issues and future work plans.

Describes an approach to the processing and presentation of online full‐text journals that utilizes several evolving information technologies, including extensible markup language (XML) and extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT). Discusses major issues and trade‐offs associated with these technologies, and also specific lessons learned from our use of these technologies in the Illinois Testbed of full‐text journal articles. Focuses especially on issues associated with the representation of documents in XML, techniques to create and normalize metadata describing XML document instances, XSLT features employed in the Illinois Testbed, and trade‐offs of different XSLT implementation options. Pays special attention to techniques for transforming between XML and HTML formats for rendering in today’s commercial Web browsers.

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The Open Archives Initiative Protocols present a promising opportunity to make metadata about archives, manuscript collections, and cultural heritage resources easier to locate and search. However, several technical barriers must be overcome before useful OAI records can be produced from the disparate metadata formats used to describe these resources. This paper examines Encoded Archival Description (EAD) as a test case of the issues to be addressed in transforming cultural heritage metadata to OAI.While EAD and OAI may appear to be incompatible, a mapping would be both useful and technically feasible. The authors suggest that it will be necessary to create numerous OAI records from one EAD file. In addition, the findings indicate that further standardization of EAD markup practices would enhance interoperability.