The Metadata Standards committee of the NDLTD Electronic Theses and
Dissertation (ETD) project met at OCLC for two days this week to review
their draft metadata standard. This group is a subcommittee of the
international project to standardize and support a global digital library
for ETDs led by by Ed Fox of Virginia Tech http://www.ndltd.org/. There are
more than 100 member institutions from some 15 or so countries participating
in this effort (further information about thier upcoming annual meeting is
available at http://library.calteh.edu/etd/)
The metadata committee met with DCMI and OCLC staff to discuss both
semantics and encoding issues for the metadata standard. The metadata
standard embraces both MARC and Dub ilin Core. It includes basic DC
elements, qualifiers from the DC Qualifier list, and a small collection of
elements and qualifiers specific to the ETD application. This approach is
very much in keeping with the emergence of application profiles as have been
disussed in the DC community in the past 6 months.
On a related matter, one of the outcomes of this meeting was a proposal to
convene a meeting of tool builders to support common approaches to making
reasonable tools available to support these activities. There is already a
tradition of public domain tools in the DC community, but it is probably
past time for the emergence of next generation tools based on:
- open source development philosophy
- RDF as the schema language and interchange format
- Unicode support
- local or domain-specific extensibility
- integration with other technologies such as the Open Archive
Initiative
I hope the implementors among us will consider this possibility and think
about how their own plans might fit into such a scenario. Please bring your
ideas to the DC-Architecture mailing list for further discussion:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-architecture.html
regards,
stu
Stuart Weibel
-------------------------
Senior Research Scientist
OCLC Office of Research
Director, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
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http://purl.org/net/weibel
+1.614,764.6081 (voice)
+1.614.764.2344
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