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This message has been cross-posted to the Australian & international metadata lists THE AUSTRALIAN METAWEB PROJECT Introduction This message is being sent to all members of the Australian metadata community - people who attended the National Metadata Seminar held on 6 March 1997 at the National Library, and metadata creators including libraries and government departments - to bring you up to date with national metadata initiatives. Since March, some members of the metadata community have been working behind the scenes to further the aims of improving resource discovery on the World Wide Web. It is generally accepted that an increase in the use of metadata will not occur until tools become available to simplify and streamline the process of metadata creation and maintenance. To achieve these aims, a bid for funding was submitted in 1997 to the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (AV-CC) to pursue the development of tools. The result was an important new project which aims to develop and disseminate such tools. MetaWeb project Named the MetaWeb project, it is a joint initiative of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA), Charles Sturt University (CSU), Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC), and the National Library of Australia (NLA). The Project will continue to develop these tools in the context of the repository model, in which metadata would be stored in a local repository rather than embedded within HTML pages using the META tag. The metadata in these local repositories would be gathered regularly by the harvesting engines. The Project will utilise Dublin Core metadata. The timeline for the project is September 1997 to July 1998. The specific tasks of the MetaWeb project include: the development and promulgation of a number of tools which can facilitate the creation & maintenance of metadata; the development of a generic Australian metadata repository model and associated software; the application of the repository model and associated software & standards to a range of testbeds; the development of standards for metadata, including extensions required to the Dublin Core standard; and the promulgation of the use of digital signatures for the authentication of networked electronic information. The full-time project team consists of Debbie Campbell, the project coordinator based at NLA, and Zhimin Zhan, the software engineer based at DSTC. A project steering committee, comprised of Brian Denehy of ADFA, David Green of CSU, Renato Iannella of DSTC and Warwick Cathro of NLA meets on a six-weekly basis. The project will advise the Australian metadata community of new developments as they arise, and encourage further use of metadata standards. The team plans to bring you new information on a regular basis. We seek your help in these endeavours, and describe below the avenues for providing it. How to find out more The activities of the Australian metadata project, known as MetaWeb, will be regularly posted to its homepage at http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/MetaWeb. Please visit the site now, to learn about the project's objectives, find out more about the project's partners, and follow the project's progress. Other metadata developments 1. Discussions about the use of metadata in the Australian context may be made to the Australian electronic mailing list. To subscribe, send an email message to <[log in to unmask]> with the single line: subscribe metadata. We welcome your suggestions. Messages will be sent regularly by the project team to this list. 2. The precursor to the National Metadata Seminar was the DC4 conference - one of a series of conferences at which the international Dublin Core community meets to progress the development of the Dublin Core standard. DC4 was the first metadata conference "downunder." In October, DC5 was convened in Helsinki, Finland. Two reports describing the outcomes of the DC5 conference are at http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/helsinki.html and at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue12/metadata/ Background Please refer to the National Library's online journal Gateways at http://www.nla.gov.au/2/pubs/gw/29/29.html#meta for background reading. Queries If you have any queries regarding the project, please contact Debbie Campbell, MetaWeb Project Coordinator, National Library of Australia, at [log in to unmask] or 02 6262 1673.