Medium or message? A new look at standards, structures, and schemata for managing electronic resources

This article examines several library metadata standards, structures and schema relevant to the challenge of managing electronic resources. Among the standards, structures and schema to be discussed are MARC, METS, Dublin Core, EAD, XrML, and ODRL. The authors’ analysis reveals that there is currently no one standard, structure or schema that adequately addresses the complexity of e‐resource management. The article concludes with an outline and proposal for a new metadata schema designed to manage electronic resources.