DCMI Collection Description

Report of Working Group, July 2005

1. Activities and Results since Shanghai conference

The principal item of the 2004-2005 workplan is the finalisation of the Application Profile for collection-level description (DC CD AP [1], together with supporting materials.

1.1 Collection Type Vocabulary

The WG has reviewed the collection type vocabulary and added some new terms [2]. The current set of terms may be revised again in the light of discussions about how to represent information about the format of items within the collection.

1.2 Format of Items

The WG has discussed the question of how to represent the fact a collection contains items of specified formats. At present, those discussions are ongoing.

1.3 Examples

A Wiki has been used to allow WG participants to contribute examples of the use of the DC CD AP to describe collections [3].

1.4 Usage Board Review of DC CD AP

The DCMI Usage Board has suggested that the DC CD AP should be the subject of a "partial review" by the UB at its meeting in Madrid in September 2005. The WG aims to produce an updated version for this purpose during August 2005. That version will probably not reflect solutions to all the outstanding issues (see "Open Issues" below), but the review will provide some feedback on the DC CD AP, particularly regarding the extent to which it reflects the DCMI Abstract Model and UB requirements for the documentation/presentation of DCAPs.

1.5 Other

The chair of the WG has presented information about the DC CD AP to a workshop organised by the JISC IESR project in London in January; to the NISO Metasearch Initiative meeting in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina in March 2005 (NISO MI Task Group 2 is proposing to adopt a slightly modified version of the DC CD AP for its collection description requirements); and to a workshop on Distributed Service Registries organised by JISC and UKOLN in Warwick in July 2005.

2. Open Issues

2.1 Location/Service

Clarify the distinction between the Location and Service entities, and the nature of the Collection-Location and Collection-Service relationships.

2.2 Format of Items

Decide how/whether to represent the fact a collection contains items of specified formats.

2.3 Date Formats

The DC CD AP requires an encoding scheme which supports the representation of date ranges. This is a current work item for the DC Date WG.

2.4 Supporting Materials

Work has begun on Usage Guidelines for the DC CD AP, though it will not be possible to finalise these until the DC CD AP itself is stable.

Within NISO MI Task Group 2, some initial work has been done on mapping between other metadata standards used for collection-level description and the version of the DC CD AP adopted by that group.

3. Plans and Priorities for 2005-2006

A meeting of the DC CD WG is scheduled to take place at the DC-2005 conference in Madrid, Spain. Plans for 2005-2006 will be discussed on the WG mailing list before the meeting and at this meeting.

References

[1] DC Collection Description Application Profile. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/collection-application-profile/

[2] Collection Type (CLDType) Vocabulary. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/collection-type/

[3] DCMI Collection Description WG Wiki http://dublincore.org/collectionwiki/