The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an international effort to create a consensus across disciplines for discovery-oriented description of diverse resources in digital form.
DCMI is currently identifying and providing semantics for a core set of types of resources (people, corporation, place, etc.) that will facilitate the description of electronic resources.
In other words, DCMI are a set of rules archivists from a range of disciplines follow in order to catalogue resources in an electronic, digital format.
Hi Erin!
ReplyDeleteI was unaware that DC was the schema that archivist prefer. Can you explain why they may choose this schema over creating their own?
Hi Stacey,
ReplyDeleteI think I used the term archivists here loosely. Are not the people who catalogue items in a collection, whether it's a collection of books, photos, or artifacts, considered "archivists" in a broad sense? After all,'Imaging Pittsburgh' used Dublin Core, and I thought that endeavor was done by archivists.
I'm by no means an expert here, but I would imagine archivists would use Dublin Core for the same reasons why a library might choose to go with the Dewey Decimal System instead of making up their own: standardization, and ease of use.