Automated Metadata Generation and the Critical Role of Catalogers and Indexers in Technical Services of the Future

Abstract

Academic and research libraries have an important role in collecting, organizing, and facilitating access to the world’s scholarly information. Technical services librarians build the foundation upon which scholarly information is managed. In the past 50 years, we have seen an increase in production of scholarly information, more complex production models and workflows, increasingly complex formats, and greater expectations from users for granularity of access. Scholars and library users can now organize their own information in a way that makes sense to them – we have a proliferation of organizing structures and indexing methods. The good news is that this places technical services librarians in a pivotal role in the knowledge economy. The challenge is that we have to rethink how we practice our craft. Future technical services librarians will become knowledge engineers, designing knowledge architecture solutions and new and dynamic ways of organizing information. This presentation will describe automated classification, indexing and summarization tools available on today’s market, and how technical services librarians will leverage these technologies in these new roles.