Dublin Core Metadata Initiative: Metadata Reference Guide: MIT Libraries

Dublin Core metadata is used to supplement existing methods for searching and indexing Web-based metadata, regardless of whether the corresponding resource is an electronic document or a "real" physical object.

The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) provides a vocabulary for describing the "core" information properties, such as "Description" and "Creator" and "Date".

Dublin Core metadata provides card catalog-like definitions for defining the properties of objects for Web-based resource discovery systems.

The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is a set of 15 descriptive definitions. It represents a core set of elements likely to be useful across a broad range of vertical industries and disciplines of study.

To make it easier to find resources on the Internet through developing metadata standards, defining frameworks, and facilitating the development of a community.

"Simple Dublin Core" is Dublin Core metadata that uses no qualifiers; only the main 15 elements of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set are expressed as simple attribute-value pairs without any "qualifiers" to provide more detailed information about a resource.

"Qualified Dublin Core" employs additional qualifiers to further refine the meaning of a resource. One use for such qualifiers are to indicate if a metadata value is a compound or structured value, rather than just a string. Qualifiers were approved for use by DCMI in 2000.

Qualifiers allow applications to increase the specificity or precision of the metadata. They may also introduce complexity that could impair the metadata's compatibility with other Dublin Core software applications. With this in mind, designers should only select from the set of approved Dublin Core qualifiers that were developed by the Dublin Core community process.

“Dumb-down principle” In theory, qualified DC should still make sense if the qualifiers are stripped away.

A “Pidgin language” -- at the 2000 Dublin Core Workshop, Tom Baker offered the idea of Dublin Core as a pidgin, a shorthand language for all metadata uses to understand.

Dublin Core tries to serve “those who need to share across disciplines or within any type of organization needing to organize and classify information.”

Dublin Core metadata is being used as the basis for descriptive systems by educational organizations, libraries, government institutions, and web page authors, among others.

DCMI began at Chicago at the 2nd International World Wide Web Conference, October 1994. Yuri Rubinsky of SoftQuad, and Stuart Weibel and Eric Miller of OCLC (who were presenting papers about scholarly publishing on the Web and leading discussions on the delivery of Web-based library services) had a hallway conversation with Joe Hardin, Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications which led to a discussion on semantics and the Web.

In March, 1995, NCSA and OCLC held a joint workshop to discuss metadata semantics in Dublin, Ohio. At this event, called simply the "OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop", more than 50 people discussed how a core set of semantics for Web-based resources would be extremely useful for categorizing the Web for easier search and retrieval. They dubbed the result "Dublin Core metadata" based on the location of the workshop. Since that time there have been a total of nine workshops held in England, Australia, Finland, Germany, Canada and the United States.

Dublin Core has been adopted by national libraries in Australia, Denmark, and Finland.

Prerequisites:

None for unqualified DC. To implement qualified, being familiar with an application profile would be useful.

DCMI has evolved via Consensus building. There have been nine workshops (most recently in October 2001).

DCMI standardization activities take place in the IETF (RFC 2413 is reference description of the initial version of the Dublin Core), and there are currently formal DC standardization activities underway in CEN (the European Information Industry Standardization Forum) and in NISO (the North American Information Standardization Organization) and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Z39.85 is the NISO standard for Dublin Core.

In addition, there has been much discussion over the placement of journal article citations in DC. Considerations included creating a separate element. Ultimately, the Citation Group has recommended that “citation” be a qualifier for Identifier.

http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/DC/citationproposal.html

The DCMI definition of an Agent: A person (author, publisher, sculptor, editor, director, etc.), or a group (organization, corporation, library, orchestra,country, federation, etc.), or an “automaton” (weather recording device, software translation program, etc.) that has a role in the lifecycle of a resource.

An Agent Core is not yet standardized, although some projects have used a DC-like structure for agent records. Suggested elements include: Name, Identifier, Agent History, Email address. The target date to have a draft core is March 2002.

Qualifiers for an Agent Core are also under discussion. It has also been suggested the DC records contain links to an authority file.

Administrative – An Administrative Core has been proposed, but the Working Group sees it more of a list of suggestions for users to pick and choose from. The final proposal is estimated to be out in May 2002.

http://corc.oclc.org/
CORC – an OCLC cataloging interface in which you can catalog in Dublin Core or view MARC records in Dublin Core

Held Annually; now incorporate a conference with exhibits and papers in addition to the working group meetings for the development of the set. There are usually DC meetings held at IFLA. A meeting of the Libraries Working Group was held at IFLA 2001 in Boston.

• Administrative
• Metadata
• Agents
• Architecture
• Citation
• Collection Description
• Education
• Government
• Libraries
• Registry
• Standards
• Tools
• Type
• User Guide

One of the most useful products of the working groups are the applications profiles. Application profiles define elements, qualifiers, and best practices. The Libraries Working Group and the Government Working Group have detailed application profiles. Sometimes, an application profile will define an element outside the standard fifteen. For Example, the Government profile defines an Audience element. The Government application profile also has a number of qualifiers for the Rights element.