[Metadatalibrarians] Dublin Core Type element; best practices

[Diane I. Hillmann]

Alice:

Good questions!

Platt, Alice wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
Type is definitely the place to do this.  "Using Dublin Core" 
(http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/) suggests that you use the 
DCMIType vocabulary terms (which would likely be "text" for most, but 
not all, of your theses) as well as any additional terms or vocabularies 
that may be more granular or specific to your need.  It helps to use 
vocabularies that are developed and maintained with web use in mind 
(with URIs, like the DCMIType terms have) or build your own using 
something like the NSDL Registry (freely available at 
http://metadataregistry.org).
> 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?
>
>   
The elements "dateOriginal" and "dateDigital" were never part of Dublin 
Core, and were developed to allow libraries to ignore the Dublin Core 
"one-to-one principle," which requires separate descriptions for 
different versions (really a good idea, and I'd be happy to provide you 
with citations to reports of projects who tried to get around this and 
regretted it later).  Unfortunately, most "flat" metadata formats 
(including MARC and MODS) allow that kind of mushiness for the sake of 
expediency, and often don't map well to other schemas as a result.
> Thank you for your assistance! As you can probably tell, I'm hoping to try to get everything set up right the first time. :)
>
>   
Good idea!  The trick is to figure out what is "right" since many of the 
"approved" solutions won't stand you in good stead over the long term.

Diane Hillmann
Editor, "Using Dublin Core"
> Alice Platt
> Digital Initiatives Librarian
> Shapiro Library
> Southern New Hampshire University
> 2500 North River Rd
> Manchester, NH 03106
> 603-668-2211 x 2156
>
> _______________________________________________
> Metadatalibrarians mailing list
> Metadatalibrarians at lists.monarchos.com
> http://lists.monarchos.com/listinfo.cgi/metadatalibrarians-monarchos.com
>
>