Finding the needle

Abstract The phenomenal growth of digital resources on the Internet, their lack of organization, and the deficiency of the search tools currently available, make searching for information on the Internet comparable to looking for the proverbial “needle in a haystack.” Developing more effective means of resource discovery and retrieval on the Internet is increasingly necessary. Dublin Core (DC), a newly developed metadata set for resource description, has the potential for providing more effective resource discovery. One major obstacle remains, however: the lack of a systematic approach to subject access. This paper discusses the need for applying controlled vocabularies to enhance the discovery of document-like objects on the Internet and outlines some options for such a process in a distributed environment, with an emphasis on the enhancement of DC with controlled vocabularies.