The following is a guest post by Chris Adams from the Repository Development Center at the Library of Congress, the technical lead for the World Digital Library.
We live in an age of cheap bits: scanning objects en masse has never been easier, storage has never been cheaper and large-scale digitization has become routine for many organizations. This poses an interesting challenge: our capacity to generate scanned images has greatly outstripped our ability to generate the metadata needed to make those items discoverable. Most people use search engines to find the information they need but our terabytes of carefully produced and diligently preserved TIFF files are effectively invisible for text-based search.