Presentation Transcript
Is Dublin Core Dying?: Is Dublin Core Dying? Kayla Willey – Brigham Young University
Cheryl Walters – Utah State University
Utah Library Association Annual Conference
St. George, Utah
May 17, 2006
What is Dublin Core?: What is Dublin Core? Title
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Dublin Core
http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/
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CDP Metadata Working Group Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices
http://www.cdpheritage.org/cdp/documents/CDPDCMBP.pdf
UALC – Where have we been?: UALC – Where have we been? Adopted Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices
Just completed an extensive document with examples of how to apply Best Practices by format
CONTENTdm based on Dublin Core
Aggregating server search fields (mapped to)
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Dublin Core: An Obituary Jeffrey Beall, Library Hi Tech News, Nov 8, 2004, pp. 40-41: Dublin Core: An Obituary Jeffrey Beall, Library Hi Tech News, Nov 8, 2004, pp. 40-41 Dublin Core metadata standard rapidly become obsolete, never caught on, outlived usefulness
Google essentially put it out of business
Profit motive on the part of OCLC created by managers rather than practitioners
Tried to be all things to all metadata users and lacked sufficient specificity to function as an operative descriptive schema
Weaknesses of Dublin Core: Weaknesses of Dublin Core Simple system
“Its fundamental flaw is that it is designed as a lowest common denominator system. Thus, converting from anything else (especially MARC) into DC results in a loss of specificity (and thus data) and converting from DC into anything else (especially MARC) results in woefully substandard data.” --J. Hahn
Scores low on interoperability (hard to crosswalk)
Examples: Initial articles in titles, single subject fields to multiple 6XX subject fields in MARC, No subfields (Young, Brigham, 1801-1877 – Family – Portraits)
Lack of standardization of entering data
No authorized forms of names, LCSH, no required fields in GENERIC form
Why are we still using Dublin Core?: Why are we still using Dublin Core? Simplicity
Cost, training requirements, personnel, diverse institutional base of participants, digital production numbers expected
Common denominator base for federated search
Many disciplines, interest groups, and professions now developing standards
Digital Library Tools haven’t supported other standards until recently
What’s the Answer?: What’s the Answer? MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema)
Jeffrey Beal’s answer
Strength: Intended to be able to carry selected data from existing MARC21 records and uses language-based tags rather than numeric ones
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/
METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard)
Strength: Allows for multiple standards to exist within a single metadata record. Employs XML schema language.
“A new infrastructure would therefore be needed to support the hierarchical representation of data required in a METS environment” -- Final Report, CDP Metadata Standards Working Group Task Force on METS (May 2006)
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/
For the present, current tools in use point to DC (Dublin Core), but as tools mature, more is possible
Encourage DiMeMa to offer other standards? Move? Require more machine produced metadata?