Harmonization of Metadata Standards

Once we move into the digital age, we are excited with the direct access to those great and high quality resources. ETDs, digital collection and digital archives are all available to a variety of researchers. The resource creators employ different metadata standards to facilitate the access and display resource in the most appropriate and descriptive way. Now most resources are created with meatadata schema Dublin Core, MODS, METS, EAD and MARC. Because of these various metadata standards, data transformation is becoming a huge challenge for metadata librarians in the digital age.

When I read the report PROLEARN by Network of Excellence in Professional Learning, I feel like we are in the darkness, it seems to me that the harmonization of metadata standards is never globally actualized. As we all know, now the most promising way to harmonize metadata standards is making crosswalks with XSLT among those various metadata schema. But according to the report, we are just like a starting point, even though we are not sure whether what we have done is correct or not, we still have a long way to go. Probably, what we really need is a standard like MARC21, which could be globally used to describe bibliographic information of a publication. Can we get that far? Before we get that far, I believe that creating crosswalks is still a feasible way to solve metadata interoperability.