[OAI-implementers] Reconsidering mandatory DC in OAI-PMH

[Kat Hagedorn]

I agree with Tom. The breadth of records in OAIster is due in large 
part to the use of the DC format by data repositories. While it may not 
be too difficult to create new XSLT stylesheets to parse non-DC 
formats, it does take time and effort (essentially money), which is in 
short supply. I recognize the need for different uses of OAI-PMH, 
however, I think we need to continue to support its use for large-scale 
service providers. I would vote for less stringent measures regarding 
the DC format.

- Kat

On Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, at 11:13 America/Detroit, Thomas G. Habing 
wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I'll cast my vote in support of the Dublin Core proponents.
>
> From my experience implementing several different OAI-based services, 
> I think that at least 50% of the OAI's current success can be 
> attributed to the common Dublin Core metadata format as opposed to the 
> transport aspects of protocol.  In fact, in many of my projects we 
> have been happy to incorporate metadata outside the bounds of OAI as 
> long as it conformed to DC, or could be easily transformed.
>
> I do agree that we should educate implementors to encourage them to 
> also support additional richer metadata formats if it makes sense for 
> their domain.  However, I think it would be a shame to completely 
> loose the DC least common denominator, as ugly and poorly suited as it 
> might be for some metadata domains.
>
> One person's chunk of coal (an ugly, ill-fitted mapping of some other 
> much richer metadata into DC) is another person diamond (Wow, a 
> resolvable URL <dc:identifier> and a blob of text in a 
> <dc:description>.  I can't wait to run my full-text analyzer and 
> indexer on it! :-))
>
> Kind regards,
> 	Tom
> -- 
> Thomas Habing
> Research Programmer, Digital Library Projects
> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
> 155 Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, MC-274
> thabing@uiuc.edu, (217) 244-4425
> http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu
>
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-------------------
Kat Hagedorn
OAIster/Metadata Harvesting Librarian
DLXS Bibliographic Class Coordinator
Digital Library Production Service
University of Michigan

http://www.oaister.org/
http://www.dlxs.org/
email: khage@umich.edu
phone: 734-615-7618