DCMI Update

Volume 1, Number 2 - February 2000

• Dublin Core version 1.1 approved as a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA)

  At last week's meeting of the CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata for Multimedia Information - Dublin Core (MMI-DC), approval in unison was given for Dublin Core version 1.1 as a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA). It will be published with a foreword and with some formal changes of the references in DC 1.1.

  The workshop now continues the work with Guidance Information for the use of Dublin Core in Europe. The Guidance material is intended to bring together documentation on the use of Dublin Core in Europe in the following areas:

  • Strategic documentation (i.e.: outlining the reasons for choosing Dublin Core or another Metadata Element Set);
  • User guidelines;
  • Technical implementation guidelines;

In parallel with this activity, is a task for the workshop to maintain and promote a knowledge base for metadata for multimedia information (the "Observatory") to continually assess relationships between Dublin Core and other initiatives - in order to assist evolution of standardised metadata schemes. This knowledge base identifies the key activities currently being undertaken in Europe and across the world - the scope of these activities and related work in European projects and programs.

Reported by Leif Andresen
Announcement on DC Standards Mailing List

• DC-Education Working Group announces a face-to-face meeting in Australia, 19-20 February 2000 The DC-Education working group will be holding its face-to-face meeting in Melbourne, Australia on the weekend of February 19-20, 2000. From this meeting, a draft proposal will emerge for possible education-related qualifiers for the Dublin core elements and possible additional elements and qualifiers, if necessary. [Call for participation] [Meeting Information]

News Briefs

• Dublin Core Element Set now available in Ukrainian
  A first step of the DC Implementation task force of the Ukrainian Library Association, this site posts comments and explanations about the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and the Dublin Core Element Set in Ukrainian. [Web Site]

Working Group Updates

• DC-Multiple Languages becomes an Interest Group.

Advisory Committee Updates

• Jose Borbinha, National Library of Portugal, becomes the newest member of the Advisory Committee. [Announcement]

Workshop News

Project and Tool Updates

• New Project: Ukrainian Library Association Metadata Project - Under the auspices of the Ukrainian Library Association, a task force has been formed. The members of this task force include G. Jaia Barrett, Deputy Executive Director, Association of Research Libraries, Svetlana Sanzhak, Automation Director, Lesia Ukrainka Public Library of Kyiv, Igor Torlin, Automation Director, State Library of the Ukraine for Children and Hanna Voskrensenska, Head, Foreign Publications Department, National Parliamentary Libary of the Ukraine. They have already posted a copy of the Dublin Core Element Set in Ukrainian and hope to provide a template at this site, in the near future, to help web resources' creators to compile DC metadata and to collect metadata of Ukrainian web resources.

• New Project: Te Kete Ipurangi - the Online Learning Centre

  This national site, an initiative of New Zealand's Ministry of Education, is being developed and managed by The Learning Centre Trust to support the growing online education community in New Zealand.

  The current online version is phase 1 of a two phase project. The second phase will see the site re-launch early in 2000 as a bilingual education portal+ site which will provide visitors with both quality-assured content and links to evaluated online education resources. The site will continue to be developed and expanded by the Trust over the next two years and the site invites contributions from the New Zealand and global education communities.

  The Trust is currently in the process of developing a National Education Standard which will define a Dublin Core education set and an education metadata set for TKI. The Trust hopes that this will be developed in collaboration with the Department of Education, Victoria, Australia so that an Australasian set can be explored. The Trust plans to make available to authors of other New Zealand education sites, tools which will assist them to apply the agreed Education Standards to the content they produce.

  For more information about this project, contact the Project Director, Jill Wilson at jill@tki.org.nz.

• New Project: Resources Organization and Searching Specification (ROSS)
  Home page: http://ross.lis.ntu.edu.tw

  Under the Taiwan Digital Museum Project (sponsored by the National Science Council), we are developing metadata for various kinds of objects (historical records, cultural objects, paintings, maps, photos, butterfly, etc.), and we adopted Dublin Core as our "core elements."

• Project Summary - submitted by Gertrud Berger
  The European Link Treasury (project ends 2000-02-01)
  
  ELT is a framework for building multi-lingual search services cooperating in a network and providing useful resource discovery for quality assessed Internet sources. The project is producing a tool kit and methodologies for building databases containing metadata for quality assessed resources. The tools are meant to fulfill the needs of providers of search services in the European school sector. A prototype service is provided as a proof of concept. The resources are described using metadata. The descriptions will be produced by editorial staff (mainly teachers) in Europe.

Web Site Changes

• Created a monthly newsletter, DCMI Update.
• Restructured the Project pages to better reflect the international scope of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.

Suggestions, article or item submissions and any comments may be sent to dc@oclc.org. Deadline for submissions is the 20th of each month.