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Seemingly gliding: the power of metadata in academic resource discovery systems

<p>Creators of resource discovery systems are at a turning point in development: their systems must satisfy the users&rsquo; needs for the delivery of high-quality, academically-rigorous content, while also providing the most straightforward, Google-like interfaces possible. The role of metadata in this scenario becomes paramount as users enter a world which seems serendipitous, but which is still subject to academic rigour, relevance and comprehensiveness.<br> Ironically, such a system, necessarily supported by high-quality metadata, increasingly conceals them, thus lowering their profile in the user&rsquo;s mind, and their importance becomes even more camouflaged to the user community. Without them, however, there is no system.<br> This paper explores this dichotomy, describing a vision for resource discovery which creates a seamless journey between related, yet disparate, resources. It moves on to look at a case study of a single tool: the HASSET thesaurus, developed at the UK Data Archive. This tool&rsquo;s journey from an inhouse-developed thesaurus to the lynch-pin of many online services is described in detail. Lastly, the paper takes the theory of achieving focused results from a simple interface and, using HASSET, applies it to an existing service: the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS). Metadata is shown to be the essential &ndash; and yet increasingly<br> invisible &ndash; force at work in effective resource discovery systems.</p>