Here's a short article about DC-dot from the forthcoming UKOLN newsletter.
It might be of interest to some...
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DC-dot [1], UKOLN's Web-based Dublin Core generator and editor, has been
available since April 1997. During that time it has been used to describe
almost 10000 different Web resources. To mark this milestone here is a
short summary of the way it is being used.
Usage over time - in April 1997 when it was first launched, DC-dot was
typically used between 100 and 200 times per month. During 1998 usage
grew steadily to around 350 accesses per month. This year has seen
continued growth, with well over 500 new resources being described each
month.
Usage by domain - DC-dot is accessed from all over the world. A quick
check of the URLs for the resources that it has been used to describe
indicates over 1800 in the UK, 1400 in the '.com' domain, 1000 in the
'.edu' domain, almost 800 in Australia, 500 in the '.org' domain, 350 in
New Zealand and so on.
Usage by Dublin Core element - not surprisingly, the elements that DC-dot
generates automatically are the ones that appear in most resource
descriptions. Identifier, Format, Title, Subject, Date, Publisher and
Type elements appear in over 60% of the descriptions. Around 40% contain
Description and Creator elements. Less than 20% of the descriptions
contain Language, Rights, Contributor and Coverage elements while only 1%
use Source and Relation.
The Perl source code for DC-dot has been available for some time [2] and
has been downloaded 120 times from over 100 hosts as well as attracting
more formal expressions of interest by several organisations. Finally,
the source code for an experimental Java version of DC-dot, has also been
available from our FTP server for some time. This has been downloaded 290
times from over 130 hosts.
What does all this tell us? Well, probably not much! DC-dot is primarily
intended to raise awareness of the Dublin Core and to give people a simple
way of experimenting with its use. As such, it is hard to tell if people
are using it for serious resource description or for experimentation and
play. Furthermore, there is no easy way to tell if people are embedding
the descriptions that they create with DC-dot into their Web resources.
However, in a very informal way, this summary does tend to endorse the
notion that there is now a widespread and growing interest in the Dublin
Core and that there is a requirement for simple tools that enable its
creation.
[1] www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot
[2] www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/software-tools
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Andy.
--
UK Office for Library and Information Networking
University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK Voice: +44 1225 323933
www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell/ Fax: +44 1225 826838
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