Diane and others,
Thanks for your notes. Although several of you have made attempts
to get a large group of users to incorporate DC elements in their
pages, I'm not hearing any examples of success in a large heterogeneous
environment where popular authoring tools are the norm.
The one project on our campus that is looking at extensive use of
DC is the National Gallery of the Spoken Word (www.ngsw.org), which
would use both DC.dot and server-side approaches.
I just cannot imagine how to persuade 5000 faculty and staff, let
alone 43,000 students, that they should download use DC.dot. It's
only going to happen in specialized projects where there is a
a strong leader with authority to impose it who understands the
payoff.
If the DC community could somehow crack into the commercial authoring
tool world it seems it'd help dramatically. If one adopts, others
might follow. Of course tolerance for the fields doesn't mean
authors would populate 'em...
Maybe by hitching to the XML hype train? "Your tool isn't fully
exploiting XML unless it supports Dublin Core." Not exactly true,
but what the heck...
/rich
>Rich:
>
>I've had some success encouraging the insertion of META tags in pages on
>campus using Andy Powell's DC-dot tool
>(http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/) In most cases this can be
>accomplished using the lowest common denominator (e.g., student labor) with
>some assistance. I generally try to do a few samples, and encourage some
>simple edits in case of odd results (generally resulting from weird HTML).
>
>There doesn't seem to be a problem with the co-existence of generic META
>tags and DC, but your mileage may vary there.
>
>I suspect you'll want to index some of the DC elements together: creator,
>contributor and publisher (for instance), and perhaps title and
>description, etc. In general, I suspect that DC-dot will pick up the
>"generic" author info and slap it into DC, so you should be safe just
>indexing the DC. But you can check that out as you proceed.
>
>I'm sure others will have additional suggestions, so I'll stop here.
>
>Diane Hillmann
>Editor, "Using Dublin Core"
>
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