Dear DC Subscribers

DCMI has long since ceased to be an academic exercise, having become a part
of the operational infrastructure for electronic information across a broad
spectrum of countries, sectors, and disciplines.  Makx Dekkers has assumed a
growing part of the management responsibility for DCMI in the two years
since he joined the DCMI Directorate, reflecting the increasing importance
of his organizational skills to the success of the Initiative.  In
recognition of this evolution, I asked the DCMI Board of Trustees, at our
meeting last year in Florence, to support a formal transition of leadership
of the Initiative to Makx.  In the intervening months we have been working
on this transition and, following approval at our May Board of Trustees
meeting in Budapest, this transition will formally take effect on July 1,
2003.

The time has arrived for me to turn my attentions to other activities,
including a return to research activities that will contribute to the
community we have created in these past years.  I do so with full confidence
that the management of DCMI is in the best of hands.  Makx brings to DCMI
strong organizational talents, deft political skills, and great energy and
experience in the field -- all tempered with pragmatic common sense.

OCLC has played, and will continue to play, a crucial role in supporting
DCMI.  OCLC remains DCMI's host institution even as the Affiliate program
develops to distribute governance and financial responsibility among its
international constituents.

DCMI will remain an important part of my own activities as well.  I will
continue to serve the DCMI Directorate as a liaison between DCMI and OCLC,
and I will serve on the Board of Trustees as a non-voting member and on the
Advisory Board as well.

It has been my privilege to convene workshops, exhort progress, and promote
the shared objectives of DCMI participants since I organized the first
Dublin Core workshop in 1996.  Eight years later, the variety of DC metadata
applications, strategies, and approaches defies our attempts to stay
current, and the invitational workshops have grown into international
conferences.

We have wrapped formal policies and procedures around our ad hoc beginnings
and have successfully created a distributed maintenance agency for an
international standard.   We have participants in 50 countries, translations
in more than 20 languages, and DCMI participants are leaders in digital
library and Internet research activities around the world.  Major DCMI
adopters include governments, supranational agencies, libraries, museums,
archives, and a growing variety of commercial organizations.

We have a Board of Trustees to help guide us, an Advisory Board to advise
us, and a Usage Board to watch over the adherence of the standard to the
principles of the Initiative.  The newly launched Affiliate program will
help promote local best practices and to distribute the cost and management
of the Initiative among its constituents. The organizational challenges of
managing the far-flung activities of asynchronous volunteers united by
common visions, but divided by time zones, languages, geography,
backgrounds, and application domains, keep life very interesting.

If the history of the Internet records our contributions, it will be due to
the vigorous discourse among our participants and the distillation of
expertise, commitment, and passion that has been brought to bear on our
common problems.   I am grateful for the opportunity to have played a role
in this, and I look forward to contributing further as that role evolves.

Sincerely,

stu

Stuart Weibel
Senior Research Scientist
OCLC Office of Research
+1 614 764 6081
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