AHDS: “Challenges to be Confronted”
Digital Preservation and Archiving
- Requires substantial infrastructural investment.
Controlled Vocabularies
- No agreement likely among service providers about their use
- OTA uses AACR; VADS uses AAT
- Even greater variation in use of date and coverage elements.
- How to assist users searching across catalogs with domain-specific controlled vocabularies? Major challenge for the future.
Z39.50 Interoperability
- Relatively immature standard; few guidelines for its use yet developed.
- Different Z39.50-aware applications may conform to standards yet remain incompatible with one another or interact in ways not meaningful or helpful to the user.
- In a wider and impersonal networked environments, means will need to be developed to ensure interoperability.