DC-Libraries Working Group meeting notes
                          22 August 2001
                           Boston, Mass.

This meeting was an official DCMI-Libraries WG event that was held in
conjunction with the International Federation of Library Associations
conference.  The main topic on the agenda was a discussion of the draft
Dublin Core Library Application Profile (referred to as DC-LAP), which is
intended to clarify the use of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set in
libraries and library-related applications and projects. It was prepared
by a subset of the DCMI-Libraries Working Group, referred to below
as the Drafting committee. The draft document is at:
http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/08/08/library-application-profile/

Thanks to Stuart Weibel who provided these notes from the meeting.

General Questions and issues

   A.  Liaison with other initiatives (eg. Z39.50, Bath Profile) is
necessary to prevent divergence

   B. Repeatability of elements

         DC says everything is repeatable should the DC-LAP impose
constraints on this?

Recommendation to Drafting committee: it is necessary to provide either
guidelines or constraints that will assure that qualified elements are not
repeated inappropriately, and that qualifiers are used to appropriately
identify distinctions among various repeated elements:

(E.g.s:         Date|created should not be repeated)
                Unqualified Title vs. Qualified

Recommendation to Drafting committee: Add qualifier to the TITLE element
to assure that 'main title' is not repeatable.


C. Mandatory elements

Recommendation to Drafting committee: Liaise with IFLA Section on
Cataloging (Barbara Tillett) as regards what elements might be made
mandatory.  This will also promote adoption by National libraries that are
following the recommendations of this committee

Distinction between Mandatory in a parsing sense or Mandatory where
applicable, which is more a matter of recommending best practice.

D. Are there any elements that can only be used in a qualified form?

There may be a distinction between stripping away scheme qualifiers as
opposed to element refinements: Using schemes that have opaque tokens will
not 'dumb-down gracefully

The initial version of the DC-LIB should take into account the difficulty
of making the AP more complex later (as opposed to the easier option of
making it simpler later on).

E. Citation

The Citation working group is actively working on this problem (and is
expected to meet in Tokyo at DC-2001)

F. Use of the Language Qualifier

Designation of the language of a title is sometimes defined with important
political implications (equivalent versions of a title must be expressed
in multiple languages).

II. Agents

Creator/Contributor/Publisher elements are presently unqualified due to
lack of consensus about what attributes are characteristics of the
resource, and which are attributes of the Agents themselves.

The need to link to an 'authority structure' is apparent (for libraries as
well as other communities).

Among suggested option, using on Contributor (with roles, possibly defined
by the MARC Relator codes)

Collapsing CCP to a single agent element would be in keeping with thinking
in the FRBR world.

Doing so may have implications for exporting the data to communities that
have less sophisticated models of bibliographic description.

III. Source

Source is a particular variety of relation.   The draft DC-LIB AP proposes
to deprecate the use of Source.

Doing so has implications for 'dumb-down' to other applications.
Options: 1. Retain Source, but define how it should be used in the library
context
               2. Deprecate, redefine as special case of Relation

The original sense of Source was to link between a non-original electronic
rendition of a resource and its previous physical manifestation.

The drafting committee should prepare a position paper examining these
alternatives and justifying subsequent action based on this justification.

IV. Proposed Additional Elements

A. Holdings/location

Possibly better to call it location?

Objective is to identify the organization responsible for the resource
(whether electronic or physical).

Particularly important for physical objects (URIs are fine for electronic
instances)

Lack of consensus here suggests that further work needs to be done by the
committee

Look at OAI for possible approaches?

B. Audience

  Adopted currently by DC-EDU, and also under consideration by
DC-Government.

Used mostly for juvenile material in library catalogs.  Largely ignored
for other uses?  Why include something that has not been widely used even
though available?

Audience encoding schemes may be very different across languages, domains,
countries, or sectors.  Schemes may not interoperate across these
boundaries, and that is probably fine.  Interoperability will not be
possible at all levels.

C. Edition or Version

Particularly important for electronic resources that change frequently,
but also for materials in physical stuff

Is this an element in its own right?
Perhaps a qualifier for Description?
For Relation?  NO - this would assume a previous thing to link to, which
may no longer be the case
For Title? NO -

Do we expect it will be a machine processable descriptor?  If so, it
probably needs to be a formal element or qualifier with specific,
controlled values to support automated processing.

D. Title Qualifiers

Uniform Title
Translated Title
Parallel Title

Is there a simple set of descriptors that will accomplish the distinctions
of catalogers without unduly complicating the creation and management of
DC metadata (and making it easier to map in and out of DC and MARC)

Uniform Title could be the essence of authority records for titles

Parallel title may be critical for accommodating legal requirement (in
multi-lingual countries, for example).

Best practice concerning leading articles (A, An, The)  Current
recommendation is to drop them.

This practice is complicated in a multi-lingual environment where it would
be unnatural to do so.

The problem comes from sorting.

Straw Poll: Overwhelming majority recommended keeping articles
No one voted to discard a few propose further analysis.

Language of the title should be identified to facilitate local sorting
algorithms

Main Title should be added as a qualifier (see section IB).

E. Next Steps

The DC Library Application Profile (consensus was to call it
"DC-Lib") will be revised based on this discussion and follow-up work.  A
revision will be distributed before the DC-9 Tokyo workshop and discussed
there at a meeting of the DC-Libraries Working Group.