Well, it's already mid-March and we haven't finished our discussions by
any means to feed into a new version of the profile. I need to have this
completed by mid-April since the Usage Board meeting is in mid-May (they
need it out a month in advance). I have been overwhelmed with other
responsibilities.

At this point I propose to use the comments submitted thus far and work
from that. In addition I will use the feedback from the meeting at ALA in
January. For those of you who could not attend please reread the meeting
notes and let me know if you have any objections to the recommendations
made.  They are at:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0201&L=dc-libraries-ap&F=&S=&P=2256

We started a bit of discussion on the Relation element. I have a few
suggestions based on the few comments (I guess mostly from Sten):

        - could we make each of the qualifiers optional? I think that is
implied in a sense if we allow for unqualified Relation. And I think we
could just say in a comment under the Relation element unqualified that if
the Relation is known and qualified DC is used, that the qualifier is
recommended.

        - could we say that in the absense of another standard identifier
that a title of the related item be used (and other relevant metadata as
needed)? And free text probably also needs to be allowed, since this is
the only place to show its relationship to something else.

Coverage.
After rereading some of the messages exchanged in January about Subject
vs. Coverage it looks like consensus is to generally follow the guidelines
suggested by NLA: see
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0201&L=dc-libraries-ap&F=&S=&P=1900
This will allow some flexibility in using both elements for geographic
names.

Date.
This is probably the biggest area where we have a number of questions and
have not had discussion. Eric Childress had offered to write something up,
but I know he's been overwhelmed by other stuff. I will spur him into
action by posing the questions from DC-Lib AP (in a separate message.)

There are a few other questions that we may need to discuss; stand by for
further messages.

Rebecca