Dr. Clifford Lynch
Metadata Harvesting and
the Indexing of the Web
Wednesday, February 14 , 2001
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Goddard's Office of the Assistant Director for Information Sciences and Chief Information Officer announces the third GSFC Information Sciences and Technology (IS&T) Colloquium presentation of the Spring 2001 Series. Dr. Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), will speak on the topic, Metadata Harvesting and the Indexing of the Web. Search engines have been used to index the web for a number of years now; however, they suffer from very real limitations, including the inability to provide access to content that is not manifest as static HTML pages on the web. Recently, there have been important developments in working standards for metadata harvesting (the Open Archives Initiative, see www.openarchives.org) which offer interfaces that sites can use to reveal metadata about digital objects that they house. These developments create very interesting opportunities for indexing more of the content available on the web, but also raise complex questions about the nature of the support infrastructure that needs to be developed, including registries and trust and reputation management tools. Dr. Lynch's talk will discuss some of the issues involved in web indexing today, provide a status report and summary of the Open Archives Work, and speculate about directions in infrastructure and applications development.

Clifford A. Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. He is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization. Lynch currently serves on the Internet 2 Applications Council; he was a member of the National Research Council committee that recently published The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Infrastructure, and now serves on the NRC committee on Last-Mile Broadband Technology.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Janet Ormes
jormes@library.gsfc.nasa.gov