Application profiles have the potential to play an important role in how libraries and other metadata providers make use of the Dublin Core. During this meeting, we will debate the merits and drawbacks of this proposal so that we can formulate a CUL response to it. Marty Kurth and David Ruddy will present information from the recent IFLA meeting about the Library Application Profile.
Ross has specifically charged this group to serve as a forum "to exchange information about metadata and its application to all library functions" (including information about the use of metadata within CUL and developments outside the university); "to provide an opportunity for feedback on the potential and the impact of intended developments or uses of metadata in CUL"; and "to make recommendations on policy decisions relating to metadata."
A Steering Committee is established to help organize the meetings and set the agendas. The current members are:
Committee members are very interested in hearing from CUL staff about topics that you would like to see us add to a meeting agenda. We have done some planning for the next few meetings but we are always open to feedback and suggestions. We are also very interested in involving staff from throughout all the functional areas.
We will usually meet on the third Friday of each month from 10:30 to noon. However, the meeting dates for October and November needed to be changed to because of scheduling conflicts related to conferences. The meeting in October will be on Friday, October 12 from 10-11:30; location TBA. The agenda for that meeting will be to discuss metadata mapping work being completed by Adam Chandler and Elaine Westbrooks as part of a CUL internal grant. The November meeting will be held on Friday, November 9 from 10:30-noon; location TBA. That meeting will be devoted to discussing the need for metadata consulting services on campus. Diane Hillmann will be leading that discussion. As meeting agendas are set, announcements will be sent to CU-LIB. Minutes from the meetings will also be distributed via CU-LIB.
In August, David Ruddy and Marty Kurth traveled to Boston for a meeting of the DC-Libraries Working Group. The topic of the discussion was the proposed DC-Lib Application Profile. David described some introductory points about the Profile, including:
Marty focused on a few particular issues relevant to the DC-Lib Application Profile. The method he used was to describe or characterize the issue, then leave it open for discussion. Whenever possible, he attempted to see if a consensus existed in the room about taking a position on the issue. Below are the issues and a brief statement. Title element issue: Should titles have qualifiers and if so how many qualifiers? In the course of talking about this issue, we quickly discovered that the real fundamental debate taking place about the DC-Lib Application Profile is whether it is intended to be used for description or resource discovery. (To our knowledge, there are no working prototypes or experiments ongoing that use the Profile.)
Initial Articles issue: Marty offered three positions on initial articles. One, delete them; two, keep them in; three, move them from the front to the end of the string. The consensus in the room was to keep them in and let software developers work out a solution for sorting correctly.
Holdings element issue: Basically the question is should these metadata records contain some kind of holdings statement for libraries? We did not have consensus, but there seemed to be a general attitude towards putting that kind of information in the "identifier" field if it is put anywhere.
Record control: DC-Lib Application Profile does not at the present time include any provisions for managing record control identifiers (like the MARC 001). Tom Turner promised to bring this "administrative metadata" concern up at the next DC meeting in Tokyo.
