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DCMI Directorate Leadership Transition

2003-07-01, As of July 1, 2003, Stuart Weibel has stepped down as Director of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Makx Dekkers, DCMI's Managing Director, will assume this role. Stu will continue an active role on the DCMI Board of Trustees, on the Advisory Board, and as primary liaison between DCMI and OCLC, the host of the DCMI Directorate.

From: Stuart Weibel
To: DC-General Distribution List

Dear DC Subscribers

DCMI has long since ceased to be an academic exercise, having become a part of the operational infrastructure for electronic information across a broad spectrum of countries, sectors, and disciplines. Makx Dekkers has assumed a growing part of the management responsibility for DCMI in the two years since he joined the DCMI Directorate, reflecting the increasing importance of his organizational skills to the success of the Initiative. In recognition of this evolution, I asked the DCMI Board of Trustees, at our meeting last year in Florence, to support a formal transition of leadership of the Initiative to Makx. In the intervening months we have been working on this transition and, following approval at our May Board of Trustees meeting in Budapest, this transition will formally take effect on July 1, 2003.

The time has arrived for me to turn my attentions to other activities, including a return to research activities that will contribute to the community we have created in these past years. I do so with full confidence that the management of DCMI is in the best of hands. Makx brings to DCMI strong organizational talents, deft political skills, and great energy and experience in the field -- all tempered with pragmatic common sense.

OCLC has played, and will continue to play, a crucial role in supporting DCMI. OCLC remains DCMI's host institution even as the Affiliate program develops to distribute governance and financial responsibility among its international constituents.

DCMI will remain an important part of my own activities as well. I will continue to serve the DCMI Directorate as a liaison between DCMI and OCLC, and I will serve on the Board of Trustees as a non-voting member and on the Advisory Board as well.

It has been my privilege to convene workshops, exhort progress, and promote the shared objectives of DCMI participants since I organized the first Dublin Core workshop in 1996. Eight years later, the variety of DC metadata applications, strategies, and approaches defies our attempts to stay current, and the invitational workshops have grown into international conferences.

We have wrapped formal policies and procedures around our ad hoc beginnings and have successfully created a distributed maintenance agency for an international standard. We have participants in 50 countries, translations in more than 20 languages, and DCMI participants are leaders in digital library and Internet research activities around the world. Major DCMI adopters include governments, supranational agencies, libraries, museums, archives, and a growing variety of commercial organizations.

We have a Board of Trustees to help guide us, an Advisory Board to advise us, and a Usage Board to watch over the adherence of the standard to the principles of the Initiative. The newly launched Affiliate program will help promote local best practices and to distribute the cost and management of the Initiative among its constituents. The organizational challenges of managing the far-flung activities of asynchronous volunteers united by common visions, but divided by time zones, languages, geography, backgrounds, and application domains, keep life very interesting.

If the history of the Internet records our contributions, it will be due to the vigorous discourse among our participants and the distillation of expertise, commitment, and passion that has been brought to bear on our common problems. I am grateful for the opportunity to have played a role in this, and I look forward to contributing further as that role evolves.

Sincerely,

stu

Stuart Weibel
Senior Research Scientist
OCLC Office of Research
+1 614 764 6081
weibel@oclc.org

From: Makx Dekkers
To: DC-General Distribution List

Dear all,

On the occasion of the announcement of Stu's resignation as Executive Director of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the Board of Trustees and the Directorate want to express our gratitude to Stu for the great work he has done for the Initiative over the last seven years.

We feel, and we are sure all of you agree, that the achievements of DCMI and the success of Dublin Core as a global, cross-domain metadata standard are in large part the result of Stu's vision and enthusiasm in building and leading this Initiative.

Stu has always had a clear focus on "making it easier to find information", which is DCMI's subtitle not by accident, and valued very much the concepts of openness, consensus-building and co-operation, summarized in the Helsinki motto "None of us is as smart as all of us".

But that is not all: Stu also realized that stability of the standard and professionalism of DCMI as an organization were of the utmost importance. Some of us will remember his "Over my dead body" when in the early days somebody proposed something that would result in more confusion, lengthy discussions and not necessarily a better solution. The current organizational structure with Board of Trustees, Directorate, Advisory Board and Usage Board is largely based on Stu's ideas, and I know that Stu is very happy with the recent endorsement of Dublin Core as an ISO standard.

The resignation of Stu as Executive Director marks an important transition point for DCMI: where we focused much of our attention in the past years on the development of the standard, the main challenge for DCMI over the next years will be to guide communities of implementers in deploying Dublin Core in various professional and technical environments. We are working hard to finalize the base specifications for the various implementation options and to incorporate new communities in the public and private sectors. We will remain responsive to evolving technical and functional requirements through the work of the Usage Board in the 'orderly development of the standard' and will continue to host the discussion groups that so many people in the Dublin Core community are involved with.

I am sure that all of us will miss Stu in the heart of the Initiative, and I would guess that he himself will sometimes miss being in the centre of attention. However, we understand and respect his decision to step down from the podium and move on to work on some of the research issues related to metadata in which he is so interested but never had time for in the past.

We wish him success in all he does, and in summary would like to honour him through one of the statements that people use when asked why they are using Dublin Core metadata: "Dublin Core: what else?"

Makx Dekkers
Managing Director
DCMI