Crosswalks, Metadata Harvesting, Federated Searching, Metasearching: Using Metadata to Connect Users and Information

Since the turn of the millennium, instantaneous access to a wide variety of content via the Web has ceased to be considered “bleeding-edge technology” and instead has become expected. In fact, from 2000 to the time of this writing, there has been continued exponential growth in the number of digital projects providing online access to a range of information resources: Web pages, full-text articles and books, cultural heritage resources (including images of works of art, architecture, and material culture), and other intellectual content, including born digital objects. Users increasingly expect that the Web will serve as a portal to the entire universe of knowledge. Recently, Google Scholar, Yahoo! and OCLC’s WorldCat (a union catalog of the holdings of national and international libraries) have joined forces to direct users to the closest library that owns the book they are seeking, whether it is available in print or online or both.1 Global access to the universe of traditional print materials and digital resources has become more than ever the goal of many institutions that create and/or manage digital resources. Unfortunately, there are still no magic programming scripts that can create seamless access to the right information in the right context so that it can be efficiently retrieved and understood. At this point, most institutions (including governments, libraries, archives, museums, and commercial enterprises) have moved from in-house manual systems to automated systems in order to provide the most efficient means to control