Course Notes: Dublin Core Metadata Initiative



Metadata is usually described as "data about data". In the context of the Web, certain "meta" tags have been developed for inclusion in the "head" sections of documents - which most browsers do not display to users - in which indexers may provide authorship information, keywords, and so forth. The document RFC 2413, "Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery", by Weibel, Kunze, Lagoze & Wolf, specifies certain essential header elements for Web documents. The "Dublin" in the title is Dublin Ohio, USA, home of OCLC - the Online Computer Library Center, Inc., where a series of invitational Metadata workshops began in 1995, with the aim of exploring ways of indexing and consequently, of retrieving and evaluating, documents on the Web. The authors note:

Finding relevant information on the World Wide Web has become increasingly problematic due to the explosive growth of networked resources. Current Web indexing evolved rapidly to fill the demand for resource discovery tools, but that indexing, while useful, is a poor substitute for richer varieties of resource description. (Source: Internet Society, 1998).


For authoritative information about the Dublin Core Initiative, see... http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core. A list of the recommended data elements is available at http://purl.oclc.org/dc/about/element_set.htm. These are the elements listed in RFC 2413:

Content - title, subject, description, source, relation, coverage.
Intellectual Property - creator, publisher, contributor, rights.
Instantiation - date, format, identifier, language.
(Source: Internet Society, 1998).

How do these categories and data elements compare with those of other schemes, such as the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2R)?

Some Ways of Using Metadata Tags

Sample Markup

Effect

<meta name="author" content="Lionel Gregory">

<meta name="keywords" content="Voyages and Travels, India, Commonwealth Expedition, Comex, Commonwealth Green Pennant Awards, British Commonwealth">

<meta name="description" content="History of the Commonwealth Expeditions (Comex), a series of journies for young people,overland from the UK to India, and in Africa (Zambia and region), and biography of their founder, Lionel Gregory, OBE. Discussion of the Commonwealth Green Pennant Awards.">

These tags, placed in the <head>...</head> section of Web pages make whatever is specified in "content" available to those search engines which recognize Metadata.



Using Metadata to Keep Search Engines From Indexing Specific Pages

Markup

Effect

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

These tags, placed in the <head>...</head> section of Web pages cause search engine robots (aka spiders) to ignore the page and anything it links to. This method is not guaranteed!



More about Metadata & Related Topics

  1. Powell, Andy."Dublin Core Management". Ariadne, issue 10. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/dublin.

  2. Ormes, S; McClure, C.R. A Comparison of public library internet connectivity in the USA and UK [9 June 1998].

  3. Page, Melvin E.A brief citation guide for Internet sources in History and the Humanities (Version 2.1).

Copyright © Christopher Brown-Syed 1995-2002. Disclaimers.