[OAI-implementers] Scientific journal metadata

Ann Apps ann.apps@man.ac.uk
Mon, 4 Aug 2003 14:23:26 +0000


Dear All,

People from the digital library and publishing communities within 
the Dublin Core community have long been aware that there is no 
obvious place to include the bibliographic information for a resource 
that is a journal article within its own metadata in simple Dublin 
Core. This is really because simple Dublin Core is just that - a core 
set of metadata for general resource description. As soon as you 
want to describe something more domain-specific you need either 
qualifed Dublin Core or even more application-specific metadata.

The discussion about which element to use for bibliographic 
metadata has gone on for many years within the DC community. 
The final recommendation is to use 'identifier' because this 
information identifies the resource. I realise this may look 
inconsistent with URIs within Identifier - but this is simple DC we're 
talking about where the value of a property is just text (you need 
qualified DC to say that it is a URI).

I'm afraid I cannot see that bibliographic information fits into the 
semantics of Type (the nature or genre of the content of the 
resource) though I suppose you could loosely be saying this is a 
journal article.

The problem with everyone making their own choice of element to 
include the bibliographic information is a loss of interoperability. It 
means you have to understand the semantics of a particular 
repository's metadata to process it.

The small amount of development I've done with OAI-PMH has 
made me question the value of passing simple DC records. It 
seems that the richness of the information often gets dumbed-down 
to probably be of little use. Simple DC is really just for basic 
interoperability not for passing richer descriptions.

If you were to use qualified DC, there is now a property 
dcterms:bibliographicCitation to hold this information. It is a 
refinement of Identifier. At present there is no recommendation for 
the content of this element beyond simple text. But we are hoping 
to define a Dublin Core Structured Value to hold this information in 
a more machine-processable way. This has actually been more-or-
less defined for some time and is probably already in use. (See 
http://www.dublincore.org/groups/citation/ for more information).

Some of the proposals for the OpenURL Framework may also 
provide a solution, and the DCMI Citation working group will be 
investigating that.

Best wishes,
	Ann


From:           	Michael Nelson <mln@cs.odu.edu>
To:             	oai-implementers@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
Subject:        	Re: [OAI-implementers] Scientific journal metadata
Date sent:      	Fri, 1 Aug 2003 20:04:34 -0400 (EDT)

> 
> and just for contrast, I put bibliographic information in dc:type and
> use dc:identifier strictly for URIs.
> 
> see, for example:
> 
> http://ntrs.nasa.gov/?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=
> oai:ltrs.larc.nasa.gov:NASA-aiaa-97-1321
> 
> my rationale...  reading the descriptions at:
> 
> http://www.dublincore.org/documents/dces/
> 
> I can see where bibliographic info could go in dc:identifier.  But I
> hate to have both free text & URIs in dc:identifier, and dc:type looks
> pretty good. And you make an argument that the bibliographic info
> tells you a good bit about resource type.
> 
> regards,
> 
> Michael
> 
> On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Simeon Warner wrote:
> 
> > 
> > For arXiv, I put bibliographic refereces in dc:identifier elements,
> > e.g.
> > 
> > <dc:identifier>Prog.Theor.Phys. 101 (1999) 1155-1164</dc:identifier>
> > 
> > in 
> > 
> > http://arXiv.org/oai2?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifie
> > r=oai:arXiv.org:hep-th/9901001
> > 
> > I do not think dc:source is correct since that is for a "A Reference
> > to a resource from which the present resource is derived". I assume
> > in your context, as in arXiv's, the bibliographic reference is a
> > reference to the resource that the record describes.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Simeon.
> > 
> > 
> > On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Jeremy Keeler wrote:
> > > Greetings,
> > > 
> > > I'm implementing an OAI repository of scientific journals, but I'm
> > > not sure what to do with the volume, issue and page metadata for
> > > the unqualified dc format. I've read a few debates over this but
> > > I've not seen where it's been solved.
> > > 
> > > I had thought about adding a bibiographic record in dc.source, as
> > > in... <dc:source>Journal of Some Research 120(3),
> > > 133-165</dc:source>
> > > 
> > > But I can see arguments against this.
> > > 
> > > It seems logical to acknowledge that this metadata can not exist
> > > in unqualified dc format, and encourage harvesters to use our
> > > more-specific metadata format. This would mean unqualified dc from
> > > our repository would be fairly useless.
> > > 
> > > Is this the accepted way to expose scientific journals through
> > > OAI?
> > > 
> > > Thanks,
> > > Jeremy Keeler
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > Jeremy Keeler
> > > Electronic Publishing | Allen Press, Inc.
> > > mailto:jkeeler@allenpress.com | (800) 627-0327 168
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > 
> > 
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> > 
> 
> ----
> Michael L. Nelson mln@cs.odu.edu http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mln/
> Dept of Computer Science, Old Dominion University, Norfolk VA 23529 +1
> 757 683 6393 +1 757 683 4900 (f)
> 
> _______________________________________________
> OAI-implementers mailing list
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> 
> 


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Ann Apps. Senior Analyst - Research & Development, MIMAS,
     University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
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Email: ann.apps@man.ac.uk  WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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