I believe that some of the problem of understanding the concept "Coverage" stems
from using a word for the Dublin Core label. If we had used arbitrary numbers,
e.g. 043 or 045, there would be far less confusion.
Instead of trying to interpret the word "Coverage," which obviously means different
things to different people, we should rather look to the definition:
"Label: Coverage
Element Description: The spatial or temporal characteristics of the intellectual
content of the resource."
This seems to me to be very clear: it relates to the geographic and/or
chronological subjects of the item. I personally don't see how the concept of
intended audience relates to this at all.
The concept of "audience" is not handled by DC unqualified. In my own experience,
"Description" is a kind of catch-all label that gets information that doesn't fit
anywhere else, so it may as well go in there.
Still, the labels for the DC fields should not be seen as the definitions of the
fields. They are only computer codes. They can display differently on different
systems. My system might display "Creator" as "Author" for example, or
"Description" as "Notes".
How to use the computer codes is determined by their definitions (found in the DC
User's Guide), which may be quite different from our own interpretations of what
"Relation, Contributor, Publisher" etc. might mean.
Jim Weinheimer
Princeton University
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