The on going struggle to organize the world’s information into a universal catalogue of knowledge has generated a variety of approaches. There are those who believe that interoperability on an international scale can only be achieved through a strict set of cataloging rules with a controlled vocabulary thesaurus such as the US National Library of Medicine MeSH. Another approach is a hierarchical set of metadata such as that used in Archives. Still others preach the utility of the user-created metadata of Folksonomies.
It would seem that one size does not fit all. This is best illustrated in the field of museum curation and the use of metadata to search and retrieve information. Museums must gather, maintain and organize information on the collections for the use of the museum and scholarly research as well as the general public. On one level the need for authenticity and completeness of content for example of preservation information is acute. Structured and controlled access points would better facilitate research and maintenance of art objects and artifacts. The investment in terms of time and cost to develop such a database is high. The question of how much information does the general public want or need to successfully utilize the museum holdings must also be addressed. Would the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set suffice to serve the general public? Or could user-generated metadata be incorporated to facilitate greater usage statistics?
It seems that the same problems of how to open a collection to all people plagued the information specialists of the 17th and 18th century as today. Gabriel Naude believed that a good library had two catalogues: one based on a systematic organization of disciplines and another that allowed an alphabetical search by author. I question whether a universal system for organizing and retrieving information is desirable, much less achievable.
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