About the presenters:

Linda Arret is a network specialist in the Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office, where she focuses on issues related to reference and public services. Linda's experience as a frontline reference librarian has been instrumental in projects she has helped lead and plan, including online catalog development, public access to the Internet, public and staff training programs, reference presence on the Web, and collaborative efforts for providing digital reference services.

Carolyn Larson has worked for many years in reference at the Library of Congress, where she has been active on various automation committees relating to staff and public training, user interface design, and indexing issues. She is currently a business reference librarian in the Science, Technology and Business Division. In addition, she is a member of the Library's Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT), a research and development team charged with the "development and implementation of initiatives to improve the tools, content, and access to bibliographic information," serving as Project Manager of the BECites+ Project as well as participating in the BEOnline+ Project. She is also a member of the ALA RUSA MARS Task Force on the Best of Free Reference Web Sites.

Summary:

Drawing on the results of a survey to be conducted this summer, we plan to address the following topics from the perspective of reference providers:

Optimum "levels" of library and metadata descriptions (including descriptive/subject/administrative/access metadata) for content retrieval of Web-based resources (e.g. full MARC records; simpler, more structured Dublin Core records);

Descriptive needs that professional reference providers feel to be essential in performing their work (e.g. more subject data, more summary information);

Additional descriptive elements which reference librarians feel would facilitate achieving accurate and useful content retrieval in response to user queries and information demands;

Traditional concepts, such as authority files, uniform titles, specialized thesauri, that might be incorporated into metadata descriptions to facilitate resource discovery;

Problems, which might be addressed through improved interaction between metadata and present-day technologies, that arise as reference providers navigate the current "continuum" of resource discovery from catalog through "middleware tools" (such as pathfinders, finding aids, abstracting and indexing services, and databases) to content.