Andy Powell wrote:
> The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DC) is a simple set of 15 metadata
> elements designed primarily as a way of improving resource descovery on
> the Internet. The 15 elements are
>
> title, subject, description, publisher, contributors, date, type, format,
> identifier, source, language, relation, coverage, rights
>
> For more information about Dublin Core see
>
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc.html
At its meeting on 13 May, CEI (now the committee responsible for the eLib
Programme, through its Development Working Group) agreed that eLib
projects should be encouraged to add Dublin Core metadata for all
scholarly resources created by or within the remit of the programme.
We want to increase the use of Dublin Core, to increase the chances of
search engines starting to make use of it. The eLib programme, which is
building up a substantial corpus of scholarly resources if looked at in
the large, is in a unique position to experiment with Dublin Core and
thereby increase accessibility to this corpus, and enhance the usefulness
of the web.
There are many difficulties in using Dublin Core, but it has now reached
the point where significant experimental deployment will be a useful
contribution to the standardisation process. Tools do exist; there are
others, but Andy Powell also wrote:
> Various Web-based tools exist to aid the creation of DC meta tags,
> including DC-dot at...
>
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/
CEI was not able to offer more money to projects to deploy Dublin Core,
but does wish to strongly recommend it. Obvious candidate projects
include electronic journals and pre-print projects, digitisation and
images projects, as well as some ANR, on demand publishing and electronic
reserve projects (the fact that a resource is initially for a closed
community should not dissuade you from thinking through the advantages of
a simple, standardised metadata scheme). In fact, just about any eLib
project should give the matter some thought. One example which has been
planning to use DC for some time was reported by Andy:
> However, various projects are beginning to use embedded Dublin Core. One
> of these is the eLib NewsAgent project which will provide a current
> awareness service for LIS. The NewsAgent robot will gather embedded
> Dublin Core meta tags (and some NewsAgent specific tags) from various Web
> based resources and feed the data into a database. More information about
> NewsAgent's use of meta tags is available at
>
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/NewsAgent/dcusage.html
Some of the issues surrounding metadata and Dublin Core in particular will
be covered in a forthcoming seminar, which Andy also mentioned:
> There is a one day seminar on 18th June, 'Metadata - what is it?' to
> "...promote awareness of existing metadata activity and to explore
> fruitful avenues for development and implementation. There will be some
> focus on the 'Dublin Core'...". More information from
>
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/metadata/
>
> Andy.
> --
> UK Office for Library and Information Networking
> University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK Voice: +44 1225 323933
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/~lisap/ Fax: +44 1225 826838
>
>
>
--
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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