[Metadatalibrarians] Dublin Core Type element; best practices

[Platt, Alice]

I recently started a new position building and managing a new digital repository using DSpace and Dublin Core. I've run into a couple of metadata questions and hope some of you might provide a little guidance.

Our initial collection will be comprised of student theses. I want to use an element to simply put the word "thesis" (and in the future, locally controlled terms like "article" "manuscript", etc.), and I'm thinking the DC element Type is the place to do it. However, I have a little conundrum about this because I'd like to follow best practices, and best practices are simply to use the term "text", which I really don't think is all that descriptive. I'm wondering if other librarians have come up with other solutions for this question.

Speaking of best practices, I originally thought I would use the CDP Best Practices, but the last issue date was September 2006 and a lot has changed since then; for example, CDP advocates using dateOriginal and dateDigital, which don't seem to exist in the current list of Dublin Core terms. Other than following Dublin Core's recommendations, is there another resource for Dublin Core best practices that someone might be able to recommend?

Thank you for your assistance! As you can probably tell, I'm hoping to try to get everything set up right the first time. :)

Alice Platt
Digital Initiatives Librarian
Shapiro Library
Southern New Hampshire University
2500 North River Rd
Manchester, NH 03106
603-668-2211 x 2156