[Metadatalibrarians] Using Dublin Core

Ruth Kitchin Tillman ruthtillman at gmail.com
Thu Feb 4 04:32:28 PST 2016


To second what John said, when you can't lock down fields I'd suggest
creating a short document with explanations of the kind of data to put in a
field. Nothing as formal as a metadata application profile, but something
to tell them whether you want dc:date as February 4, 2015 or 2015-02-04 or
02/04/2015. Do you want them to use title case in dc:title or sentence case
like one does in MARC? Little things like that, with examples, to get the
most consistent records. I ran a project last spring using DC for basic
description of a lot of newsletters and luckily the only thing I ended up
with inconsistencies on was subjects.

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 4:42 PM, John Fienberg <johnfienberg at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dublin Core is probably the best possible thing you could use without any
> kind of a budget, especially without a training budget. It's the most
> idiot-proof metadata schema because it's the easiest to customize. I am a
> corporate librarian for advertising agencies (means I'm the only person in
> my entire multinational operation with any librarian training) and Dublin
> Core is my best friend. I'm not sure what tool you'd want to use, but I can
> reaffirm that you're making the right call by using Dublin Core. Volunteers
> will absolutely be able to use it with minimal training, but you are
> probably going to want to lock down as many fields as you can into
> controlled vocabulary so that people can't make silly mistakes (typing the
> same commonly used keyword three different ways in three different records,
> for example)​. Volunteers rarely fully understand how crucial it is to
> input everything with as close to 100% accuracy as possible while
> cataloging, so locking down a lot of fields into controlled vocabulary will
> significantly limit the damage that inaccurate entry can cause.
>
> I hope your endeavor goes well! Your community is lucky to have you!
>
> -John
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