Press release announcing a new report issued jointly by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL). As the title suggests, the report calls for greater standardization and coordination of digitization efforts in britain, tied to research into user needs. The reasoning behind this call emerges about half way through the report: "the introduction of such a system would keep track of resources, aid discovery and prevent duplication... significant gaps in provision remain in many disciplines... (and) it will never be possible to digitise everything, so future developments must respond to researchers' needs." Well, maybe. But is a centralized and standardized approach the best way to do this? If so, then why not adhere to a European standard and system, or a global one? A proliferation of standards exists, as the report notes, and it is important to understand why the development of metadata has assumed a more local, rather than a more global, character.
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