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

[Thomas G. Habing]

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