DCMI Collection Description Community

DC Collection Description

Report of Working Group, October 2002

Summary of activity

The Work Plan for the Group proposed:

  • the development of a DC-based application profile suitable for the collection-level description of a wide range of collections;
  • the development of appropriate schemas to support the encoding of instances, in accordance with the conventions endorsed by other DCMI Recommendations;
  • the creation of appropriate usage guidelines for the schema;
  • a list of recommended values for the dc:type property when applied to the description of collections
  • a set of crosswalks for mapping between this collection description schema and some major domain-specific standards and schema used for collection-level description (e.g. ISAD(G), EAD, MARC21).

At the end of February 2002, the co-chairs posted a proposal that this Working Group might examine the properties/attributes used to describe a collection in the RSLP Collection Description schema,

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/

in order to evaluate their suitability for use within a DC Application Profile for collection-level description. Those properties are sumarised here:

http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispj/dc-cd/rslpcd.html

However, there was limited response to the February proposal from members of the dc-collections list.

In July, the co-chairs posted a message highlighting this limited response and suggested that it would be difficult to argue, to DCMI or to the larger community, that this proposal represented a consensus on the metadata required for collection-level description.

This message did prompt some further discussion, with positive contributions from Rachel Perkins, Deane Zeeman and Ann Apps, and a small number of off-list queries on the status of the proposal.

Development activity seems to suggest that there is an interest in metadata schemas for description at collection-level; but the experience of the group suggests that it is less clear that at this time there is an interest in the development of a Dublin Core-based application profile for collection-level description.

Recommendation:

It is not clear whether to recommend that DCMI should attempt to relaunch the activity of this WG in 2002-2003, or to suspend the activity of the WG.