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The development of the digital library, often based upon a digital repository, has further complicated the library environment. In addition to their MARC data, libraries have become curators of rapidly expanding collections of digital objects, data sets, and metadata in other schemas such as the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). These These resources and their metadata are typically stored in digital repositories and become a parallel, yet separate, database of record. This lack of integration has caused great difficulties in consistency and maintenance as the concept of a single database of record has broken down. And even beyond these two repositories (the ILS and the Digital Repository), as libraries look to the future, they will be asked to step outside these more traditional materials to become the curators of the vast knowledge the university creates, in all its richness and diversity. Interactive scholarly works, unpublished data sets, information about faculty contained in profiling systems, metadata about learning objects, once integrated with more traditional library resources, will allow our faculty and students to explore our information resources and make associations that are impossible today.
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