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Please note: I am forwarding this message on behalf of Martin Dillon, Director of the OCLC Institute, an educational arm of OCLC whose mission is to provide library managers with advanced training and educational services. stu ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- At the OCLC Institute we have conducted many workshops which apply the Dublin Core to various sites and collections. In all I would say that different work groups have explored its usefulness across 20 or so applications ranging from a collection of maps to a university home page. In every single one of these applications confusion over the use of the three fields in question was the paramount concern of the participants. They had many objections; let me list a few. It is often not possible to distinguish between publisher and creator. For most sites, the "publisher" is the web master and not usually relevant for retrieval. For most sites, "creator" is also the web master and not relevant for retrieval. These problems and others like them caused difficulties during record creation and led to the observation that users, when seeking the works of a particular individual or corporation, would need to combine all three fields in a search. If the user was knowledgeable enough to do this, he/she would be burdened by the need. If not, the user would create the wrong search and get poor results. The conclusion reached by participants was this: if the fields, to be used effectively, needed to be combined by users, why not combine them at creation. I am not at all persuaded that the many users we hope to have for the Dublin core, both as creators and consumers, are well served by accepting a bad design at this early stage in order to avoid the short term heat that would be caused by a correction.