DCers... This is in the way of a plea for a broader perspective on user
and use for the DC that I find myself compelled to do from time to time...

While the DC has now become the center of attention of archivists,
librarians, and other professional information providers, I think we
continue to be in danger of losing sight of the fact that it was intended
to be usable and used by authors (i.e., non-professional information
providers).

Further, with the non-professional user in mind, it seems unlikely that
those metadata authors will have a clear distinction between "find it"
and "get it" when the object itself is a networked resource (and the
metadata is usually embedded in or attachd to the object).

In my research, I work with people inside organizations whose principle
interest in networked resources is to re-use them (as Paepcke found in
1996)-- not to learn of their existence and then go look at them. Re-use
means gaining access to, and metadata (in various forms) is needed.

I find it useful to remind myself that most of the networked resources out
there do hot have the advantage of being in a collection or otherwise
being "sheparded" -- most are under the control of non-professionals who
do not make the fine distinctions professionals do when it comes to
whether something is published or not, versioning, rights management,
genre and the like. Yet, new web authoring tools can automatically
generate some metadata and prompt the author for additional input (without
a tutorial in the semantics of source vs. resource).

Even from a collections point of view, it seems less and less likely that
one can insist that all items described by the DC must be networked
resources because people work and create in mixed media environments.
However, I think the focus of DC on networked resources is important
because this where the contribution to knowledge and practice is needed
and can be made.

I would like to echo the strong emphasis on dealing with complex formating
issues -- in my research users report that the format of the document is a
major factor in their evaluation of it. We are in need of workable
reprsentations for compound documents, especially those that do not
correspond to a hierarchical or hyperlinked structure.

Lisa Murphy
[Starting at Louisiana State University College of Business Administration
in August. Currently still at Indiana University -- [log in to unmask]]

On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Ian Morrison wrote:

> As one of that considerable number, I had always assumed that the words
> _resource discovery_ referred to the discovery of resources by means of
> the internet. Obviously it will be some time before we can digitise and
> communicate the actual objects, so I see DC as being a means by which an
> enquirer can determine where objects of interest are located, and,
> hopefully, whether or not they are then worth travelling to view. In many
> cases it will be the information associated with the objects which is of
> interest, and DC should be able to guide people to the sources of that
> information. IIRC, David Bearman himself said something along these
> lines at DC5 in Helsinki.
>
> -----------------------------------------------
> Ian O. Morrison, Scottish Museums Documentation
> Officer & SCRAN Data Co-ordinator,
> National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh EH1 1JF
>
>

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Lisa Murphy [log in to unmask]
Accntng & Information Systems School of Business
Indiana University Bloomington, IN USA
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