You'll want to read this article, Inheritance and loss? A brief survey of Google Books, by Paul Duguid. It illustrates what happens when the nature of books and their accompanying metadata are ignored when scanning and digitizing.
Duguid's main argument focuses on the quality of the scanning. But he also demonstrates how the lack of sufficient metadata--something as basic as volume numbers for multivolume works--can cause problems when searching. This gets to the heart of the "digital fundamentalist" argument that search algorithms will eliminate the necessity for structured metadata. As my source mentions it's "an eye-opening read."
Via Bradley P. Allen
Comments