At the end of this historical overview, observations about trends in the most recent past help to frame some of the current debate surrounding metadata and descriptive practice [15].
In the library community, an intense and complex debate about user-appropriate cataloging and access mechanisms has been stirred up by Karen Calhoun’s report to the Library of Congress titled The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools (Calhoun, 2006). The following quote from the executive summary gives a flavor of the urgency in Calhoun’s assessment: “The catalog is in decline, its processes and structures are unsustainable, and change needs to be swift.” These uncertainties naturally fuel the desire to generate metadata more cost-effectively, and to exploit it in more user-friendly systems.