I was out last week and without e-mail (by choice, and it was nice!) 
so I read all of this Thanksgiving thread on DC and search engines 
in one sitting. It looks to me like the thread runs the risk of coming 
back to the issue of what the major search engines will or won't do 
with our metadata before some really relevant (IMHO) items get 
some attention.  I'm thinking of .........

(1) Debbie Cambell's response to the original post.
"As a consequence, in Australia, various organisations and portals 
have developed their own, or are currently developing them."

(2) Jim Weimheimer
"If our (librarians') dreams of metadata are going to work, we must
give up on Alta Vista, Yahoo, etc. and develop search engines that 
serve our own needs (which include identifying, acquiring, selecting,
describing, arranging, storing, and retrieving). "

(3) Garry Forger
"Part of our process is to divorce ourselves from the chaos that the 
entire web consists of, but use the technology to allow individuals 
to design and deliver html, sound, video etc over the web."

(4) Alex Satrapa
"So write indexers that handle the metadata for all the resources 
that *you* are responsible for.  Then write a search engine that 
brokers your search to a bunch of known indices."

(5) Dianne Hillman
" In my experience, the people creating the web-based information 
resources, *even if they are working in libraries* are not thinking 
about metadata and what will be necessary to provide access to 
their web-empires once they reach a certain critical mass."

I believe the comments of these five wise people hint at a 
fundamental problem; we want them (the major web search 
companies) to value DC before we've convinced our own Library 
institutions and organizations to value DC. I took a quick look at 
some of the sites of the folks that have posted to this thread, and a 
few pages from institutions that could be considered close to the 
issue and I think the problem is much closer to home than Alta 
Vista.

- The only tag I found at the National Archives of Australia
(http://www.naa.gov.au/index.htm) was......<META 
NAME=GENERATOR CONTENT="Claris Home Page 3.0 30 Day 
Trial">

- None at Princeton....http://libweb.princeton.edu:2003/

- At http://amol.org.au/ is see "NAME=title", "NAME=keywords", 
and "NAME=description"

- At http://www.gloscc.gov.uk/circe/ I found "NAME=keywords", 
"NAME=description", and "NAME"="Microsoft Theme" (Now I'm 
really concerned!)

- At http://www.ala.org/ there is no metadata, even on the 
documents that talk about metadata.

- At http://www.w3.org/ there are a few tags of the "<meta HTTP-
EQUIV=" type, and some PICS stuff, but I couldn't find much 
metadata on pages below 'home'. (to be fair I did find a document 
that used DC on the W3 site, but it was Stu's 1996 paper "A 
Proposed Convention for Embedding Metadata in HTML." )

- At OCLC (http://www.oclc.org/oclc/menu/home1.htm) the 3 or 4 
tokens are also of the  "<meta HTTP-EQUIV=" form, and I find the 
ever present  <meta NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Microsoft 
FrontPage 3.0"> 

- And last, but certainly not least, at http://purl.org/DC/ there was 
no metadata.  Shouldn't there be, and shouldn't that metadata be 
Dublin Core metadata?

Only the Cornell WebGoddess (Dianne) and Gary (University of 
Arizona) get an A+ for using Dublin Core in live, public pages.  A 
few servers didn't respond, so maybe there are a few others that 
use DC 'in house', and maybe (like at my library) its kinda 'in the 
works'......but......

If only a few of the organizations we work for are using metadata on 
public pages in a fashion that promotes what we consider to be the 
best practice, then perhaps we should be more concerned about 
our inability to convince our colleagues and peers, supervisors, 
directors, trustees and funders that DC is useful than our inability 
to convince anybody else.

I've got some more to say on this subject, but I'd like to 1st ask the 
group what way they want this search engine thread to go?  And, 
for the record, I know how difficult it can be to convince colleagues 
and peers, supervisors, directors, trustees and funders that the sky 
is blue, but I still think thats the more important task.

ed

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Edward McNeeley                           [log in to unmask]
Delaware Division of Libraries
43 S. DuPont Highway                    VOICE (302) 739-4748 ext.116
Dover, Delaware 19901                    FAX   (302) 739-6787
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