Dear all,
The Nordic metadata project has been completed. Our final report is
available in HTML format at http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/nmfinal.htm.
A printed version will be published in September. Orders should be sent
to NORDINFO (Nordic Council for Scientific Information)
([log in to unmask]).
Nordic co-operation in development of Dublin Core tools will continue in
the future. NORDINFO, which funded 50 % of the Nordic metadata, has in
June made a decision to support also a follow-up project, Nordic
metadata II. This project will start in the autumn and last two years.
The project plan is available at
http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/nm2plan.html.
Our main aim was and still is development of tools needed for creation,
harvesting and indexing of Dublin Core -based metadata. We have been
quite successfull in fostering the usage of Dublin Core: for instance,
in Finland and Denmark a decision has been made to add Dublin Core
-based metadata into all public documents published in the Web. In each
Nordic country, there are also numerous Dublin Core -based projects
which use the Nordic metadata tools as a basis of their work.
One tool of the first Nordic metadata project that deserves to be
mentioned here is the URN generator. We were deeply conserned by the
fact that URL's were commonly used to identify documents, although URL's
were never ment to be unique and persistent identifiers. A URL provides
just a location and protocol for accessing it. Therefore, in
co-operation with the IETF URN Working Group, we developed the syntax
for the National Bibliography Number -based URN's and built an
application which generates these URN's automatically (see
http://www.lub.lu.se/cgi-bin/nmurn.pl). Of course we also wrote
tentative URN user guidelines (see
http://www.lub.lu.se/metadata/URN-help.html).
URN resolution will initially (before the generic Internet URN resultion
infrastructure is installed) be based on the national Web indexes and
archives built in the Nordic Web Index and Nordic Web Archive projects.
The URN generator software has been in use in Sweden and Finland since
May, and the German national library has also decided to install it.
European national librarians will discuss about the possibility of
establishing a common URN policy in the CENL (Conference of European
National Librarians) meeting next October.
Best regards,
Juha Hakala
Project manager
Nordic metadata I & II
Helsinki University Library
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