Cole and Shreeves open this article by establishing that while the proliferation of digital resources has increased the ability for engagement with materials online, the magnitude of this potential "is tempered for many end‐users by the difficulties in locating specific, desired information resources within the almost overwhelming aggregation of information now available." In this essay, Cole and Shreeves examine a grant-funded research initiative tasked with addressing these issues of aggregation. The goal of the project is to collect "item-level metadata for digital collections and content associated with IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) and NLG (National Leadership Grant) projects." The project objective was to facilitate a network/map of resources in order to situate them in context and make them more accessible to end-users. Cole and Shreeves argue that digital resources need to strike a middle-ground between Google-like approaches and the laborious undertaking of "large scale (and accordingly high‐cost) monolithic digital library solutions." In conclusion, Cole and Shreeves reiterate that the "advent of the Web and other related digital technologies presents a good opportunity for increased content sharing and collaboration in the development of information systems." Creating frameworks that make this content more visible and accessible will only increase its potential for research.

he aim of the essay is to showcase an "approach to conceptualizing, measuring, and assessing metadata quality" by presenting the results from an empirical study on the quality of metadata across large corpuses. The methodology of this empirical study involved creating a framework of quality dimensions used to then assess the quality of the data. These dimensions were intrinsic information quality, relational information quality, and reputational information quality. Stvilia et al. concluded in their study that poor quality metadata is equal to a value loss, that quality is equal to the amount of interaction with an object, and that quality is also equal to the effectiveness (and efficiency) of the metadata. In a random sample of 150 OAI Simple DC records (taken from a total corpus of 154,782 records) the research team determined six major quality issues: "(1) lack of completeness, (2) redundant metadata; (3) lack of clarity; (4) incorrect use of DC schema elements or semantic inconsistency; (5) structural inconsistency and (6) inaccurate representation." In conclusion, Stvilia et al. state that their future research will "focus on user valuations of metadata quality."

Howland, Wright, Boughan, and Roberts conduct a comparative study of resource results from Google Scholar and proprietary library databases. The object of their research is to address some of the central critiques and queries of Google Scholar: Are Google Scholar result sets more or less scholarly than licensed library database result sets?; Does the scholarliness of Google Scholar vary across disciplines?; and Is comprehensiveness of content the primary indicator of a resource’s usefulness? Howland, Wright, Boughan, and Roberts position their work against other studies by arguing that they are much more interested in evaluating the results than measuring the database. The authors developed a modified Kapoun collection-assessment rubric as the backbone of their research. The study's results demonstrated that, on average, that resources found on Google Scholar have higher average scholarliness ratings than those on the library database alone. Additionally, there wasn't a statistically significant difference in the results among disciplines. As way of conclusion, Howland, Wright, Boughan, and Roberts suggest several avenues for further studies.

In this article Patrick Juola addresses stagnancy in digital humanities. Juola argues that, even though the discipline has been around for over forty years, digital humanities is still considered to be an emerging sub-discipline of the larger humanities. Juola acknowledges that this presents major problems for digital humanities scholars because tenure-track positions are rare, and digital humanities publications are significantly under-read and under-valued. Juola analyses these "patterns of neglect" and tries to identify their cause. Juola argues that a lack of participation and a lack of awareness are two main factors. Juola speculates that the lack of awareness and use of digital humanities tools is motivated by a mismatch between the tools needed/wanted by the humanities generally and the tools being produced. Juola suggests that digital humanities scholars focus on creating a "killer application": a tool whose uses justify its development and support. Juola identifies a couple of major areas that he thinks could use a super tool. To conclude, Juola advocates for the continued financial support of the digital humanities in order to fuel the creation of a "killer application".

In this article, Berners-Lee, Hall, and Shadbolt examine the development of the semantic web over the last 50 years. The semantic web is characterized as a "web of actionable information" comprised of documents for humans to read and data for computers to manipulate. The authors argue that the semantic web necessitates a need for ontologies and data integration to function properly. An exploration of data frameworks, types of ontologies, and the rise of folksonomies are detailed in this article. As way of conclusion, Berners-Lee, Hall, and Shadbolt point towards a new wave of development in the methods, challenges, and techniques of the semantic web.

In this article, Bruce and Hillmann explore the challenges of defining metadata. They argue that past efforts on the part of librarians have been relatively inconsequential in defining the parameters and standards for metadata. Bruce and Hillmann assert that there is a tension between metadata efficiency and quality that makes setting standards a particular challenge. Quality metadata is characterized in this article through the evocation and explanation of several criteria: completeness, accuracy, provenance, conformance to expectations, consistency, coherence, timeliness, and accessibility. In order to assist in the practical implementation of these standards, Bruce and Hillmann construct a table with each element, a series of questions that should be asked when addressing that element, and where the information should be located in the metadata schema.

In this article, Jerome McGann demonstrates that the crisis in the humanities is not the result of a crisis in critical theory or cultural studies, but rather a failure to fully embrace and switch into a digital mode. He argues that the humanities should cultivate a realistic attitude and accept the inevitability of moving into online scholarly production, which could maintain its reliability by practicing online peer-review. McGann points to the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) project, which implements “integrated online peer-reviewed research in nineteenth-century British and American studies,” as an example of a platform that has made use of digital resources and offers “functioning, standards based model for uniformly coded digital materials, along with a suite of computerized analytic and interpretive tools.” McGann also demonstrates how the reluctance to switch to a digital mode stems from institutional and political reasons, rather than technical or economic ones.

In this article, the authors explore the use and meaning of the word "collection." While the authors observe that creating individual collections with individual metadata definitions is acceptable on a small scale, when the shift is made to federated or distributed collections, this is no longer a viable option. The authors use the IMLS Digital Collection Registry as an case-study for their research. They explore the results of a staged, multi-method research strategy that addresses issues such as collection scope, collection consistency, collection enrichment, and audience. Finally, in their discussion the authors conjecture about the influence of the digital world on federated collections.

In this blog post published on the popular ProfHacker feed, Amy Earhart discusses the learning benefits of integrating use of the NINES Collex in the literature classroom. Earhart's course requires students to navigate the NINES database to locate six items they could "use in a research paper on a topic related to our class readings and discussions." The students assemble these items into an exhibit with analysis and a conclusion. Earhart argues that the process of this project, not the outcome, was her main focus in its creation. Earhart uses the common hiccups and errors mades by students in using databases as teaching moments to emphasize quality research practices. By exposing the technological and economics behind scholarly databases, Earhart argues that students became more efficient and informed researchers.