OCLC Announces News of DCMI, Virtual Electronic Library Project

Information Today, Sept, 2000

OCLC has announced that the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), an organization leading the development of international standards to improve electronic resource management and information discovery, has released the formal recommendation of the Dublin Core (DC) Qualifiers. The addition of the DC Qualifiers enhances the semantic precision of the existing DC Metadata Element Set. OCLC has also announced that the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) and OCLC have completed development of the CIC Virtual Electronic Library (VEL) Phase I and have agreed to suspend the joint development effort for the second phase of the project.

DCMI

For the past year, working groups of the Dublin Core developed these newly agreed upon refinements to give better access to information. The new recommendations for Dublin Core Qualifiers increase the effectiveness of metadata by giving it finer granularity. For example, a publication's date, which would be the Dublin Core Metadata Element, may be further detailed as a particular type by using a Dublin Core Qualifier such as date last modified, date created, or date issued.

"Think of Legos," said Stuart Weibel, OCLC consulting research scientist and DCMI director. "The close tolerances of these simple toys ensure all the different Lego themes, built at different times, can work together smoothly. Dublin Core is the basic Lego block for promoting discovery of resources on the Web: a simple and interoperable foundation upon which many information solutions can be built. The introduction of Dublin Core Qualifiers is like adding color and themes to the Legos--it helps enrich the description of information resources on the Internet."

The DC Qualifiers build upon the DC Metadata Element Set, which provides 15 categories to describe resources on the Web. Known as the Dublin Core, the metadata model has become the de facto standard for description of information on the Internet.

Dublin Core's usage committee has launched the next step toward a cohesive metadata standard. The DC Qualifiers improve interpretation of metadata values and can be easily recorded or transferred into HTML, XML, RDF, or relational databases. The evolution of DC Qualifiers draws from the input of many individuals across a broad array of disciplines.

Users include museum informatics specialists, archivists, digital library researchers, libraries, government information providers, and a variety of content providers. Their efforts have led standards organizations, such as NISO (National Information Standards Organization) in the U.S. and CEN in Europe (European Committee for Standardization), to view the DC Metadata Element Set as a benchmark candidate for simple resource description on the Internet. More recently, new sectors, such as education and industry, have been attracted to Dublin Core's simplicity, multilingual scope, consensus philosophy, and widespread adoption.

More information about the new recommendation can be found at http://purl.org/dc/documents/dcmes-qualifiers.> OCLC, CIC

The joint development project, which began in 1996, has to date resulted in a new distributed system (Phase I) that links online public access catalogs of the CIC university libraries, provides a Web-based patron interface, and allows patrons to initiate their own interlibrary loan requests. However, until more is known about distributed system technology and its application to resource sharing among large groups of libraries, the CIC and OCLC have agreed to suspend Phase II, which involved development of an independent client/server-based interlibrary loan/document request system.

The OCLC SiteSearch WebZ software is the platform for the CIC VEL. CIC member libraries customized the interface provided by WebZ to meet the unique needs of its users and to work best with its local Web site. WebZ provides rapid, desktop access to the combined library resources of more than 60 million books, 550,000 serials, and countless databases and digital systems owned or licensed collectively by the CIC's 12 major teaching and research universities.

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation, with headquarters in Champaign, Illinois, is the academic consortium of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago, with programs and activities that encompass nearly all aspects of university activity. Member institutions include the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois (Chicago and Urbana-Champaign campuses), Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The CIC Home Page is located at http://www.cic.uiuc.edu.