Week 6: Technologies Useful for Digital Repositories

First of all, I 'd like to say how much I have enjoyed reading Reese & Banerjee. Their writing is informative and accessible and I look forward to referring back to it. What I like about chapter four is that it is not explicitly about metadata, but retains a thread, throughout the chapter, emphasizing the role of metadata and its significance for digital library technologies, ultimately concluding that metadata is second only to content, as far as what is most important for any repository. While it is possible to make alternate arguments, e.g. that preservation is most important or that the ability to transfer content is most important, I feel partial to the metadata-centric approach and the idea that a collection is only as useful as it is findable.

I especially appreciated the inclusion of the "XML family tree" and the description of various XML components that followed, including XPATH, XFORMS, XLINK, etc. One aspect that I find especially intriguing is the function of the XLINK and the concept of describing the actual links between XML documents, as well as documents themselves. It seems that this type of description is at least loosely related to some of the concepts underlying the semantic web and the tendency toward a more data-driven web environment.