The Open Ebook Forum, an association of software developers, publishers,
authors, information specialists and others that creates and maintains
standards for electronic books, recently established several new working
groups to deal with the issues brought up by the AAP standards.  These
include the OEB Identifiers Working Group and OEB Metadata Working
Group. Some of the participants in these new groups (from AAP) were
responsible for the work that went into the proposed AAP standards.  The
two groups are evaluating the recommendations in the AAP documents,
particularly will be looking at the relationship between ONIX (which is
recommended for use in the AAP proposed standard on metadata) and Dublin
Core.  Dublin Core is used in the Open Ebook Forum's Publication Structure
document, which is a standard for the structure of the content of
electronic books and also includes some high level metadata expressed in
DC. Thus, that relationship is being explored (and it is not yet certain
whether the AAP recommendations for identifiers and metadata will be
accepted by the Open Ebook Forum working groups).

The two working groups are holding a meeting at the Library of Congress in
Washington later this week in which I will be participating.  They will
also meet during the Open Ebook Forum Summit to be held in Paris in March,
and it is expected that this topic of the relationship between Dublin Core
and ONIX and electronic books will be discussed. A preliminary mapping
between the two has been recently done.

Rebecca
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^  Rebecca S. Guenther                                   ^^
^^  Senior Networking and Standards Specialist            ^^
^^  Network Development and MARC Standards Office         ^^
^^  1st and Independence Ave. SE                          ^^
^^  Library of Congress                                   ^^
^^  Washington, DC 20540-4402                             ^^
^^  (202) 707-5092 (voice)    (202) 707-0115 (FAX)        ^^
^^  [log in to unmask]                                          ^^
^^                                                        ^^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

> Date:    Mon, 8 Jan 2001 11:57:06 -0600
> From:    [log in to unmask]
> Subject: AAP metadata standards and DC
>
> Greetings,
> The AAP Metadata Standards for Ebooks have been released,
> and comments were requested until December 31, 2000 by AAP.
>
> (See http://www.publishers.org/home/press/ebookpr.htm, AAP Releases
> Recommendations for Ebook Standards, bottom of the page)
>
> I have an ALA committee meeting at midwinter that is looking at the
> digitization of historical government documents, and is looking at the
> AAP metadata and numbering (DOI, ISBN) standards.. My question to
> [log in to unmask] is: How does the AAP metadata framework
> "fit" with the Dublin Core?  Are elements and standards different? Any
> replies before Thursday appreciated.... but later ones welcome also,
> as the committee will be meeting for awhile. Betsy Richmond
>
> Elizabeth B. Richmond, Assistant Professor
> Reference Department
> McIntyre Library
> University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire
> Eau Claire, WI 54702-4004
>
> E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
> Voice:  (715) 836-4076
> Fax:     (715) 836-2949
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Date:    Mon, 8 Jan 2001 15:39:53 -0500
> From:    "Weibel,Stu" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Citations
>
> Ann Apps raised several points in her note about citations that deserve
> attention (and effort) by those concerned with capturing citations using DC.
>
>
> First and foremost, her commendation of the efforts of Cliff Morgan are well
> deserved.  Cliff took on the Citation working group at a time when the
> problem was confounded by our evolving notions of how structured values
> should be encoded in DC.  The difficulty in reaching closure on this problem
> has been a problem of the evolving understanding of the use of metadata
> values with substructure as well as the intrinsic complexity of the problem
> to begin with.
>
> In answer to the question 'Is there interest in taking citation work
> further?' I hope there will be a strongly affirmative answer. There is a
> clear need for machine parsable citation information that can be easily
> extracted from DC records.  Yes, they should be human-readable, but it is
> also critical that they should be reliably parseable.
>
> I'd like to endorse the proposal that an application profile be developed by
> a small group of citation enthusiasts (that is, people who have
> responsibilities for actual systems), and that these folks work the results
> of the DC-Citation recommendations and with a representative of the Usage
> committee to keep any recommendations in line with the general principles of
> the DCMI metadata architecture.
>
> If you've read this far in this note, AND you feel you have experience-based
> insight with both DC and citation problems, AND you are interested in
> working on and testing a practical, interoperable solution, please notify me
> with a phone call or an email message this week with a subject line of:
>
>    CITATION APPLICATION PROFILE
>
> This problem needs to be solved.
>
> regards
>
> stu
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ann Apps [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, January 08, 2001 9:00 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Citations
>
>
> Dear fellow DC folk,
>
> I am sending this to dc-general rather than dc-citation because I
> think there may be people interested in the citation issue who are
> not subscribed to dc-citation. In fact, I think the citation issue
> should be of interest to most DC people. How to capture the
> bibliographic citation of a resource, specifically a journal article, is
> not just a niche publishing issue but of importance in all sectors
> such as libraries, education (where a journal article is an
> educational resource), etc.
>
> [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> > you could all take this as an invitation to consider whether the WG
> > should be convened under a new charter: I think we've just about
> > beaten the original charter to death. Stu Weibel and Traugott Koch's
> > recent article in D-Lib
> > (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/weibel/12weibel.html) suggests
> > three open issues for the Citation WG:
> >
> > 1) extension to conference proceedings etc.
> > 2) controlled vocabularies, e.g. for journal abbreviations
> > 3) linking initiatives, e.g. CrossRef
> >
> Other issues which spring to mind are: extension to other genres
> such as books, reports, theses, ....; author affiliation (this is the
> author's affiliation pertaining to the resource not necessarily her/his
> current address; a journal article type; and the development of a
> Citation Profile as suggested in one or two recent messages (both
> for capturing a bibliographic record and for reference linking).
>
> And of course the DC-Citation Working Group's recommendation
> still hasn't been ratified. Does this mean there is really little interest
> in this issue within the DC community in general?
>
> The version issue was also unresolved - it just turned into 'pass the
> parcel' between DC element working groups! This is a completely
> separate issue from the citation one and lumping them together
> has caused much confusion. Version control should also be of
> interest across most sectors. [I still believe there should be a
> DC.Version element :) ]
>
> Is there any interest in taking the citation further? It seems to me
> that if there is no DC consensus as to how to capture a citation,
> then everyone who has a need to create metadata for this will
> simply 'do their own thing'. There are already several divergent
> initiatives and probably many local intiatives. I would guess that
> most of these are essentially the same but using different labels for
> the fields of a citation record. This seems a pity when DC provides
> us with a forum for consensus. I would like to keep my own
> development work in line with current best practice but generally
> don't have time for long drawn out discussions - things have to be
> implemented fairly quickly.
>
> It does seem that there is a fundamental problem with trying to
> define a citation in some structured way within a DC element, the
> minimalist / structuralist dichotomy. Some of the DC community
> believe that DC should be for simple resource discovery only and
> this should always be so. Thus information like a bibliographic
> record should just be an unstructured human readable text string (I
> don't dispute the idea that it should be human readable which is
> why I'm not keen on some of the cryptic field labels suggested by
> other initiatives). This precludes the use of DC for any application
> which requires the content of an element to be machine parsable.
> My personal opinion is that DC should be capable of evolving to
> encompass the wider uses it now has, without obviating its use for
> simple resource discovery. But if the minimalist view is the
> generally accepted one then there is no point in taking the citation
> issue any further.
>
> Within my own work I am interested in creating an application
> profile. I think that if there was a general DC citation profile this
> could be extrapolated for use within particluar applications. Is there
> any interest in developing such a profile, or maybe two - a
> bibliographic record one and a reference linking one? Although this
> looks to me like the way forward, I have little idea how to actually
> create an application rpofile, particularly a machine readable one.
>
> I think Cliff Morgan should be thanked for the excellent work he did
> in leading the DC-Citation working group, and identifying a final
> recommendation. I'm sorry that he no longer has time to continue
> this work. Time is a problem for everyone associated with DC. I
> guess we all have full time jobs. Some of us, who are dependent on
> project funding to remain in employment, also have some issues
> over how much unfunded work we can do on top of our normal
> workload.
>
> So is there any interest in continuing development of the citation
> issue? If there is it would seem a good idea for discussion to take
> place on the [log in to unmask] maillist, even though the
> DC-Citation working group as was has now been closed.
>
> Best wishes and Happy New Year to all.
>         Ann
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mrs. Ann Apps. Electronic Publishing @ MIMAS. Manchester Computing,
>      University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
> Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039    Fax: +44 (0) 0161 275 6040
> Email: [log in to unmask]  WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ------------------------------
>
> End of DC-GENERAL Digest - 7 Jan 2001 to 8 Jan 2001 (#2001-5)
> *************************************************************
>