Establishing sustainable and scalable workflows for cataloging and metadata services

Purpose: Academic and research libraries have been experiencing a lot of changes over the last two decades. The users have become technology savvy and want to discover and use library collections via web portals instead of coming to library gateways. To meet these rapidly changing users’ needs, academic and research libraries are busy identifying new service models and areas of improvement. Cataloging and metadata services units in academic and research libraries are no exception. As discovery of library collections largely depends on the quality and design of metadata, cataloging and metadata services units must identify new areas of work and establish new roles by building sustainable workflows that utilize available metadata technologies. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: This paper discusses a list of challenges that academic libraries’ cataloging and metadata services units have encountered over the years, and ways to build sustainable workflows, including collaborations between units in and outside of the institution, and in the cloud; tools, technologies, metadata standards and semantic web technologies; and most importantly, exploration and research. The paper also includes examples and uses cases of both traditional metadata workflows and experimentation with linked open data that were built upon metadata technologies and will ultimately support emerging user needs. Findings: To develop sustainable and scalable workflows that meet users’ changing needs, cataloging and metadata professionals need not only to work with new information technologies, but must also be equipped with soft skills and in-depth professional knowledge. Originality/value: This paper discusses how cataloging and metadata services units have been exploiting information technologies and creating new scalable workflows to adapt to these changes, and what is required to establish and maintain these workflows.