Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Dublin Core questions asked by a reader. Can you give answers?

A reader has asked about the adoption rate of Dublin Core outside of the library/information profession. Here are his questions, as I understand them. Maybe you can comment with you thoughts and answers, and help me give him the information he desires.
  • Is Dublin Core being supported by common tools? Think not of OPACs and digitization programs, but more common web tools.
  • How well is Dublin Core being adopted outside of the library/information community?
  • Are tools such as RSS using Dublin Core?
In other words, is Dublin Core really something that the non-library community needs to be learning and using?

2 comments:

Dennis Moser said...

A quick search on Google turns up a surprising amount of material:

http://tinyurl.com/dpc7s

...using the terms "RSS and Dublin Core usage."

Weblog 2.0 specifically uses Dublin Core modules (this is the tool that runs www.webreference.com); RSSWriter will accomodate the use of Dublin Core; and a Dlib article from December 2004, addresses the use of RSS, along with Dublin Core in science publishing: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/hammond/12hammond.html

So I would say, yes, the non-library community is certainly grappling with the use of the Dublin Core and in particular, with the use of RSS.

Dennis

Anonymous said...

There is also a Dublin Core Corporate Circle http://dublincore.org/groups/corporate/ that discusses use of DC in corporate/enterprise settings. Some of the participants may be coming from the LIS community, but the applications seem to be non-LIS.