Andy Powell wrote:
> For info, there's a new, somewhat experimental, Dublin Core generator
> available at
>
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cgi-bin/dcdot.pl
I have been wanting for some time to promote the use of metadata in the
scholarly resources that eLib is creating, and particularly the use of the
Dublin Core in that context. Some of the instabilities in syntax put me
off, but since these appear to be settling down, this debate on lis-elib
seems to be a good opportunity. For those unfamiliar with Dublinc Core (or
DC), UKOLN's pages at http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc.html
are a good start to finding out more.
In eLib we are creating a significant corpus of scholarly information in
elecxtronic form, if you take the programme as a whole. However, much of
it stands outside the recognised systems for finding information, either
the abstracting and indexing services (some reluctant to deal with
electronic-only sources yet), or the 'vacuum cleaner' robots (too great a
depth, perhaps; also the significant use of PDF which is not indexed).
It seems to me that we should be promoting the idea of included metadata,
as part and parcel of good practice in the scholarly arena. So I
personally would like to see many projects taking a good look at Dublin
Core metadata, and beginning to experiment with including it in their
resources. I'd like to see some more significant discussion on what people
learn from doing that, and how they get round some of the problems (like
for example how to associated DC metadata with PDF files). I know the
syntax is still a bit rocky, but it seems likely that there is sufficient
do some basic descriptive work on most pages.
DC suffers somewhat from the 'chicken and egg' problem. There is not
enough around for the 'vacuum cleaners' to bother about; since the 'vacuum
cleaners' ignore it, few think it worth while to add the matadata.
Ignoring the unpleasantly mixed metaphor, we can do something to break
that deadlock.
We have one more year of eLib as it stands. Should we not make sure that
the resources we have produced are as high quality and forward looking as
possible in that time?
--
Chris Rusbridge
Programme Director, Electronic Libraries Programme
The Library, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Phone 01203 524979 Fax 01203 524981
Email [log in to unmask]
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