Hello, Meta-folk,

DC General has had very little traffic in the nature of general information
sharing of late.  I am forewarding this post in hopes of encouraging a bit
more, and also because I think the content is of wide interest.

I was fortunate to have been invited to participate in the Council of
Federal Libraries seminar in Ottawa this week, and wanted to share with you
some highlights of this event.

First of all, congratulations are in order for Nancy Brodie, who many of you
will recognize as a fount of quiet, persistent leadership in the
DC-Government working group.  Nancy was awarded the Agatha Bystram Award at
the seminar, given annually for outstanding leadership in the realm of
information management in Canada.  Nancy received this award, in part, for
her role in supporting the adoption of the Dublin Core in the Canadian
Government.

This seminar set a record for CFL participation, attracting over 200
conferees from across Canada, for a program of plenary speakers and panel
discussions in the wonderful venue of the Museum of Civilization.

In the early days of the Dublin Core, we imagined that communities of
practice would arise around applications, and standards of best practice
would emerge from the community.  In practice, the reality has been somewhat
more tortured, and the result is that we have been (rightly) criticised for
not providing enough guidance, enough direction, enough examples to actually
see interoperable standards of practice emerge.  We have a ways to go!

But Nancy's presentation, and Deane Zeeman's followup presentation on the
evolution of metadata deployment in the Canadian government provided a
wonderful counter example, fulfilling those original hopes and setting a
great example of what can be done by a dedicated group with a vision.  They
are extending the metadata, using DC as a core along side different
varieties of metadata. They are using and registering local multilingual
thesauri.   They are using metadata to help design the delivery of
government information that will have a positive impact on the information
seeking behavior (and needs) of citizens.  They are not done, by any means
-- indeed, they are at the beginning of driving metadata throughout the
information lifecycle of Canadian governement information, but they have a
plan and a vision that encompasses a broad spectrum of metadata issues that
confront most application areas.

The many people involved in this transformation are not working in a vacuum
They have shared ideas with and benefitted greatly from others working in
the DC-Government space, and had warm accolades for the sharing of
information by the other pioneers in e-government activities (especially by
Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, whose documentation in English is
natuarlly more accessible in the Anglo-French linguistic milieu of the
Canadian government services).

In my capacity as leader of DCMI, I sometimes hear more about our failings
(and what we should be doing to address them) than our successes.  The CFL
event in Ottawa was unalloyed pleasure, as it exemplified and justified all
the hopes embodied in the past 8 years of the evolution of the Dublin Core:
cross  domain discovery... supporting diversity... refinement with local
encoding schemes and local qualifiers... modularity and integration with
other metadata standards.  But even more, the underlying assumption of the
Canadian effort is that metadata can be used for much more than discovery...
it is the foundation tool for aligning the organization and delivery of
information services with the needs of its citizens.

I hope that these efforts will be widely recognized as helping to fulfill
not only the local needs of their application community, but stimulating and
inspiring similar efforts elsewhere.  I also hope that some of you are
saying to yourselves..."sure, but what about activity X, Application Y...
why have these not received more recognition?"  Undoubtably, there are many
other such activities that should be seen more widely, and, as I intimated
at the beginning of this note, I hope more will be brought to the attention
of the community.  Please share!

The URL for the Seminar is http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/6/37/s37-3007-e.html.  I am
given to understand that the presentations will be made available soon at
this site.  I hope others interested in government information and metadata
will find this work as inspiring as I have, and mine the efforts of those
active in the DC-government working group for ideas, and contribute their
own as well.

Many thanks, also, to the organizers (particularly Michael Ireland and
Donald Bidd).  All those who attended DC-8 in Ottawa will remember the
gracious and well-organized welcome that visitors received, and this event
certainly upheld this tradtition.  Oh, Canada!


stu

Stuart Weibel
Executive Director
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
OCLC Office of Research
+1 614 764 6081
[log in to unmask]
http://dublincore.org