About the presenter: Carl Lagoze is Digital Library Scientist in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. In this capacity he leads a number of digital library research efforts in the Department and across the university, collaborating with the University Library and Office of Information Technology. Mr. Lagoze's research is funded through a number of NSF, DARPA, and industry grants, most notably a major grant from the multi-agency Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2. In general, this research can be characterized as investigations into the technical and organizational issues in the development and administration of distributed digital libraries. The recent focus of this research is on policy: What are the policies that need to be asserted to ensure the reliability, security, and preservation of content and services in distributed digital libraries and what are the mechanisms for enforcing those policies? Mr. Lagoze is the co-inventor of Dienst, a widely deployed protocol and architecture for distributed document libraries. He is also the co-author of the Warwick Framework, a modular metadata model for digital content, which is a conceptual basis for the Resource Description Framework (RDF), now a WWW metadata standard. Mr. Lagoze's professional activities include serving on the advisory committee of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, serving on the program committee of U.S. and international digital library conferences, and numerous talks both in the U.S. and internationally on his research on metadata and digital library architecture.

Summary: (revised 11/1/00)

The speaker proposes that the digital context presents a dramatically new context than that which was addressed by the traditional cataloging model. Whereas the catalog has depended on relatively fixed resources delivered by a relatively stable set of role players (publishers, authors, information intermediaries), the digital context is characterized by fluidity in both content and those who provide it. The speaker proposes new roles for the catalog based on this new reality and a new data model that meets the needs of these roles. An "event-aware" model of cataloging, one that recognizes digital resources as inherently dynamic, will allow the research library to adapt to the realities of the digital millenium.