Dear all,
On the occasion of the announcement of Stu’s resignation as Executive
Director of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the Board of Trustees and
the Directorate want to express our gratitude to Stu for the great work he
has done for the Initiative over the last seven years.
We feel, and we are sure all of you agree, that the achievements of DCMI and
the success of Dublin Core as a global, cross-domain metadata standard are
in large part the result of Stu’s vision and enthusiasm in building and
leading this Initiative.
Stu has always had a clear focus on “making it easier to find information”,
which is DCMI’s subtitle not by accident, and valued very much the concepts
of openness, consensus-building and co-operation, summarized in the Helsinki
motto “None of us is as smart as all of us”.
But that is not all: Stu also realized that stability of the standard and
professionalism of DCMI as an organization were of the utmost importance.
Some of us will remember his “Over my dead body” when in the early days
somebody proposed something that would result in more confusion, lengthy
discussions and not necessarily a better solution. The current
organizational structure with Board of Trustees, Directorate, Advisory Board
and Usage Board is largely based on Stu’s ideas, and I know that Stu is very
happy with the recent endorsement of Dublin Core as an ISO standard.
The resignation of Stu as Executive Director marks an important transition
point for DCMI: where we focused much of our attention in the past years on
the development of the standard, the main challenge for DCMI over the next
years will be to guide communities of implementers in deploying Dublin Core
in various professional and technical environments. We are working hard to
finalize the base specifications for the various implementation options and
to incorporate new communities in the public and private sectors. We will
remain responsive to evolving technical and functional requirements through
the work of the Usage Board in the ‘orderly development of the standard’ and
will continue to host the discussion groups that so many people in the
Dublin Core community are involved with.
I am sure that all of us will miss Stu in the heart of the Initiative, and I
would guess that he himself will sometimes miss being in the centre of
attention. However, we understand and respect his decision to step down from
the podium and move on to work on some of the research issues related to
metadata in which he is so interested but never had time for in the past.
We wish him success in all he does, and in summary would like to honour him
through one of the statements that people use when asked why they are using
Dublin Core metadata: “Dublin Core: what else?”
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Makx Dekkers e-mail: [log in to unmask]
tel: +352 2636 0150 fax: +352 2636 0151 GSM: +352 021 199910
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