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DCMI Libraries Working Group Meeting Report, Florence, Italy, 15 October 2002

DCMI-Libraries Working Group Meeting Report, Florence, Italy, 15 October 2002

The DCMI Libraries Working Group met on 15 October 2002 at DC2002. The group had the following agenda:

  1. Discussion of revised DC-Lib application profile http://dublincore.org/documents/library-application-profile/
  2. Consideration of proposals relating to Agents (DCMI Agent Detail and Roles for Creator, Contributor, Publisher) Links: DCMI Agent Detail: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0204&L=dc-agents&T=0&F=&S=&P=169 Roles for CCP: http://www.loc.gov/marc/dc/Agent-roles.html
    NOTE: Roles will be discussed at the DCMI Usage Board meeting on Sat. and Sun. Rebecca will report on these discussions.
  3. Discussion of current projects using (or considering the use of) DC-Lib AP.
  4. Discussion about partnerships to implement testbeds for DC-Lib AP
  5. Work agenda for coming year.

Highlights of meeting

Review of DC-Library Application Profile

Rebecca introduced the revised DC-Lib application profile. Participants were anxious to use it and were mostly concerned about it becoming finalized. Of particular concern was how to provide for a stable application profile sooner rather than later given the decisions of the DCMI Usage Board that were still pending. It was suggested that the following changes be made in a revision of DC-Lib:

  • Include the ability to express roles for Creator/Contributor
  • Add best practice statement for how to deal with questionable dates and date ranges. This could be based on previous discussion in the working group (prior to the current revision)
  • As a companion document, develop guidelines for implementors of the AP
  • Include genre lists that have been proposed within DC-Type (TGM and AAT)
  • Add LCSH as an encoding scheme for Temporal Coverage

Consideration of Agent proposals discussed by Usage Board

Rebecca updated the group on the proposal to make Creator a refinement of Contributor and to use the MARC relator terms as refinements for Contributor. Participants were concerned that the former means that Creator is rendered obsolete and how it will affect current implementations. Some expressed the need to make the distinction between primary contributions (Creator) and secondary contributions (Contributor). It was not clear what impact that change might have and how it will be documented. Some clarification is needed.

Participants were generally interested in making the entire relator term list available rather than a subset, as was discussed by the Usage Board. DC-Lib WG may be interested in making a formal proposal for "DCMI Agent Detail" as structured values for Contributor (and also Creator? this was not clear because of the ambiguity in the proposal to make creator a refinement of contributor).

Projects using DC-Lib

Several participants described projects using DC-Lib application profile.

National Library of Australia/ScreenSound Australia. Warwick Cathro described this collaborative project involving the discovery of Australia music resources, including sheet music digitized by NLA and digitized sound recordings from the sound archive (see: http://www.musicaustralia.org). Metadata is harvested from the NLA catalog as well as in the MAVIS system used for the sound archive. DC-Lib is used as a starting point to bring together diverse metadata formats.

German virtual library. Heike Neuroth described this project to give access to online and print resources, dissertations, ejournals, etc. A metadata core set based on DC-Lib is used as a basis for individual application profiles. Each virtual library uses DC-Lib with additions and specialized elements. This facilitates cross browsing of collections. See: http://www.anglistikguide.de

The European Library (TEL). There was a separate session on TEL, a project that is developing a system for access to the major national and deposit collections (mainly digital, but not precluding paper) in European national libraries. The DC-Library application profile is used as a starting point for the metadata along with other elements needed.

Testbeds for DC-Lib

There is a need to stabilize DC-Lib AP so that further experimentation may commence. There are already several projects as mentioned in the session that are already experimenting. One suggestion was to influence integrated library system vendors to add DC-Lib as an option in their systems. The working group will continue to monitor experiments using the application profile. There is also a need to monitor the qualify of Dublin Core™ implementations; the working group may want to play a role in this.

Work plan for the coming year

  • Complete a maintenance revision of DC-Lib AP reflecting discussion at this meeting (by Mar. 2003)
  • Work on a guidelines document for application profiles (Spring 2003)
  • Develop a document that provides guidance to implementors of DC-Lib (Spring 2003)
  • Attempt to influence ILS vendors to use DC-Lib (mid-2003)
  • Provide outreach to the library community to make them aware of DC-Lib; this could be done through professional organizations (ongoing)
  • Once DC-Lib is stable, write an XML schema (mid-2003). Those that have already written RDF and/or XML schemas may wish to share them.

Respectfully submitted,
Rebecca Guenther
Chair, DCMI Libraries Working Group