DCMI Collection Description

Report of Working Group, August 2006

1. Activity since February 2006

1.1 Representing Item Format

Agreement was reached on the use of a property to represent the media-type of items within a collection. As a consequence of this decision some changes were also made to the proposed use of the dc:type property and the Collection Type Vocabulary.

1.2 Preparation for Usage Board Review of DC Collection Description Application Profile

The WG is currently preparing the version of the DC CD AP (and supporting documents) which will be submitted to the Usage Board for review at its meeting in Manzanillo at the end of September.

2. Open issues

2.1 Ownership/Maintenance of DC CD AP and Ownership/Maintenance of new terms

The issues of who owns and maintains both the DC CD AP itself and the new terms that have been created for use in that DCAP remain to be resolved, but some initial discussions have taken place which indicate that a third party is willing to take on this role, in partnership with DCMI if appropriate.

2.2 Syntax encoding scheme for open-ended date ranges

The DC CD AP will be published with a reference to a date syntax encoding scheme which forms part of the Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema. If the DCMI Date WG develops a suitable syntax encoding scheme in the future, consideration will be given at that time to amending the DC CD AP to reference that new scheme.

3. Plans and priorities for 2006-2007

The WG is currently considering options for future activities. At this time, it is not clear whether the WG will continue with a revised charter/workplan or whether it will close down.