Meeting
Seminar on International Metadata Developments - 6 March 1997
Introduction
Following on from the 4th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop in Canberra on 3 - 5 March, the National Library of Australia organised a Seminar on International Metadata Developments on the 6 March.
The Seminar drew on the wide range of international speakers attending the 4th Dublin Core Workshop and provided a first hand opportunity to understand the wide range of international developments in metadata standards and to discuss possible ways of implementing standard metadata elements by Australian creators of electronic publications.
Metadata provides a consistent way of describing Internet information which improves the reliability and efficiency of searching. This Seminar provided a good overview of the latest developments and standards that are being designed to improve the accessibility to electronic information.
Speakers
Stuart Weibel, Senior Research Scientist, OCLC Office of Research
Stuart Weibel has worked in the Office of Research at OCLC since 1985. During this time he has managed projects in the areas of automated cataloguing, document capture and structure analysis, and electronic publishing. He currently coordinates networked information research projects in the Office of Research, including applications of World Wide Web technology and Internet protocol standardization efforts. Stuart is active in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups on HypertextMarkup Language and Uniform Resource Identifiers. He is also a founding member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). Other areas of service include participation on the Task Force on the Preservation of Digital Information and the ALCTS Task Force on Bibliographic Access to Electronic Resources.
Carl Lagoze, Lead Researcher, Digital Library Research Group, Cornell University
Carl Lagoze is the Lead Researcher in the Digital Library Research Group in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. Carl has been involved in digital library research and implementation for over three years. His research interests include architectures and protocols for distributed digital library services, the architecture of digital object repositories, and frameworks for integrating multiple forms of metadata.
Renato Iannella, Senior Research Scientist, DSTC
Renato Iannella is a Senior Research Scientist at the Distributed Technology Centre (DSTC) based in Brisbane, Australia. At the DSTC he leads the Resource Discovery Unit which investigates technologies used in the discovery and retrieval of Internet resources on globally distributed networked. Renato has been active in many aspects of metadata research, including Dublin Core, PICS, and improving Websearching and indexing with metadata.
Rachel Heery, Metadata Projects Co-ordinator, UKOLN
Rachel Heery co-ordinates work on metadata projects. As part of the metadata research group she works on projects concerned with the use of metadata for resource discovery and improved bibliographic control of electronic publications. UKOLN is now participating in two European projects, DESIRE and BIBLINK, focusing on the formats, creation and gathering of metadata. Work is also continuing on the metadata aspects of two eLib projects, ROADS and NewsAgent. Rachel joined UKOLN in 1995, prior to that she worked for the library system vendor SLS as an implementation manager and as a product manager for the SLS Database.
Rebecca Guenther, Senior MARC Standards Specialist, Library of Congress
Rebecca Guenther is Senior MARC Standards Specialist in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress. Her current responsibilities include work on national and international library automation standards, including MARC bibliographic, authority, classification, holdings, and community information formats, and MARC code lists for languages, countries, and geographic areas. In addition she has participated in the development of the ISO language code draft standard. Rebecca has been involved in topics concerning MARC records for electronic information resources and metadata. She participated in the previous metadata workshops in Dublin, Ohio and University of Warwick, UK and has been an active contributor to metadata discussions. Rebecca established a mapping between Dublin Core elements and MARC fields and has worked on mappings to other metadata standards. She has authored papers on the MARC classification format, providing access to online information resources in MARC, and metadata.
John Perkins, Project Director, Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI)
John Perkins operates Mus*Info, a Nova Scotia-based international consulting company specialising in collections documentation, collections management and technology management for museums, archives and cultural heritage organisations. He is currently working in the area of information and image management for museums, museum networking and information; collections data interchange, and digital information standards. In addition to consulting assignments John is Executive Director of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI), a group of the world's most prestigious museums.
Eliot Christian, United States Geological Survey
Eliot Christian is developing and promoting a global vision for information access that enhances the free flow of information through decentralized information locator services. He helped establish this approach in law, policy, standards, and technology at the United States Federal level, building consensus among government agencies and developing key support among libraries and information service organizations and corporations. Eliot is now focused on carrying these ideas to other levels of government and internationally as part of the emergent Global Information Infrastructure.
Philip DesAutels, World Wide Web Consortium
Philip DesAutels is a project manager responsible for work on digital signatures and intellectual property rights.
Eric Wainwright, Deputy Director-General, National Library of Australia
Eric Wainwright has been Deputy Director-General at the National Library of Australia since 1988. Eric has had a long interest in library automation, and has been a member of the Australian Bibliographic Network Committee since 1981, including a period as Chairman. Eric has been a member of the Australian Government Information Services Policy Board, and chaired the Government's Information Management Steering Committee which reported in October 1996 on strategies for access to and management of Commonwealth government information. He is also a member of the Information Policy Advisory Council advising the Minister for Communication and the Arts.
Further Reading
The following links will provide the interested reader with further information on metadata.
- The Dublin Core Homepage
- The definitive source of information on historical and current developments concerning the Dublin Core and related metadata initiatives.
- The META2 Mailing List - meta2@mrrl.lut.ac.uk
- The primary mailing list forum for the discussion of Dublin Core
issues
To subscribe, send a message to majordomo@mrrl.lut.ac.uk with a body of:
subscribe meta2 your-name-here - The Warwick Metadata Workshop: A Framework for the Deployment of Resource Description
- Lorcan Dempsey and Stuart L. Weibel in D-Lib Magazine, July 1996.
- The Warwick Framework: A Container Architecture for Aggregating Sets of Metadata
- Carl Lagoze, Clifford A. Lynch and Ron Daniel Jr.
D-Lib Magazine, July 1996. - A Syntax for Dublin Core Metadata: Recommendations from the Second Metadata Workshop
- Lou Burnard, Eric Miller, Liam Quin, and C.M. Sperberg-McQueen.
- Metadata for the Masses
- Paul Miller in Ariadne, September, 1996.
- Dublin Core Qualifiers
- Jon Knight, and Martin Hamilton
- A Proposed Convention for Embedding Metadata in HTML
- A position paper from the May, 1996 W3C Workshop on Distributed
Indexing and Searching
- Down Under with the Dublin Core
- Paul Miller and Tony Gill offer a view of the recent Dublin Core metadata workshop in the Australian capital, Canberra. This article appears in the Web version only of Ariadne.
