A review of existing practice |
...an eLib supporting study |
The Dublin Core [DC] is a 15 element metadata set primarily designed to enhance resource discovery on the Web. Originally conceived for author-generated resource descriptions, it has also attracted significant interest from more formal resource description communities such as libraries and museums. The 15 elements are:
Dublin Core is currently typically embedded into HTML <META> tags in the <HEAD> section of HTML Web pages. In this way it is made available for collection and indexing by Web robots. In the future DC metadata is increasingly likely to be made available using the W3C's Resource Description Framework [RDF], a generic metadata architecture for the Web.
The Dublin Core was originally designed primarily for describing document-like objects (or DLOs) made available in a digital format on the Internet. There has however been some experimental use of the Dublin Core to describe other kinds of objects.
The Dublin Core Type Element Working Group [DCTYPE] is developing a list of resource types (a controlled vocabulary for use with the DC Type element). The proposed list currently includes the terms 'collection' and 'dataset', which could be used to refer to different kinds of collections. However, it should be noted that, at the time of writing, the inclusion of 'collection' in the list of types was still under discussion.
Here is an example of the use of Dublin Core to provide a simple description of the University of Bath Library OPAC:
Title: University of Bath Library OPAC
Identifier: telnet://library.bath.ac.uk/
Description: A searchable database of all the books and periodicals in
the University of Bath Library
Publisher: University of Bath
Type: collection
Type: catalogue.library
Language: en-uk
Coverage: Bath, UK