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Report of the Meeting of the DCMI Libraries Application Profile Task Group and DC Libraries Community

at DC-2007, Singapore Thursday, 30th August 2007 11.30 – 13.00

The DC Libraries Communities met for a ninety minute session with approximately 25 people attending. The agenda was in two parts – the first to discuss the work of the two task groups and the second for information sharing between libraries implementing Dublin core.

  1. Overview and update of actions from last year
    1. DCMI Libraries Application Profile Task Group
    2. DCMI RDA Task Group
  2. Future work of the Task Groups
  3. Short presentations
    1. Competence Centre for Interoperable Metadata - Christine Frodl and Stefanie Ruehle, National Library of Germany
    2. Dublin Core in Practice – Haliza Jailani, National Library Board of Singapore
    3. Using DC-Lib for the European Library – Sally Chambers, The European Library

Agenda Item 1. Overview and update of actions from last year

Following the change in DCMI working group structures introduced in 2006, the first action from last year was to establish a Libraries Application Profile Task Group to continue the revision of the DC-Lib and to create a wiki as the location for the work to take place. This was achieved and can be seen at [1] where the full work plan is given. Work on the revision of DC-Lib did not progress after that however, partly due to developments in our RDA involvement which had implications for the future of DC-Lib. This was discussed under a later agenda item in the meeting. There were also technical considerations relating to working on a HTML document in a wiki.

The second task was to progress the work that had been started in 2005 when DC Libraries accepted an invitation to participate in the review of RDA. Things had moved on considerably after DC 2006 when Don Chatham (from the RDA publisher side) met informally with people from the various metadata communities who gather at DC conferences. Further discussion had resulted in the Data Model Meeting that took place at the British Library in London in May 2007. The outcomes of that meeting can be seen at [2]. The main achievement is that a DCMI/RDA Task Group has been established and project funding has been applied for to carry out the work items identified at the London meeting. The wiki for this new task group is at [3]. There was no further discussion about the DC-RDA work in the meeting as there was to be a Special Session on RDA following the Libraries meeting.

Before moving on to discuss future work Robina Clayphan briefly recapped the new specification for a DC Application Profile that had been presented earlier in the conference [4]. Called the Singapore Framework, it formalises the documentation that constitutes the declaration of a DCAM-conformant Application Profile. All task groups creating DCAPs are asked to follow the model so this had to be taken into consideration for DC-Lib.

Agenda Item 2. Future work of the DC-Lib Task Group

There was discussion about any impact on DC-Lib of the proposed DC RDA application profile. It was concluded that since RDA would not be finalised until 2009 we could not yet judge the impact and should proceed with work on DC-Lib in the meantime. The conclusions were:

  1. to go ahead with the revision of the existing HTML AP with general updating, tightening up the definitions and replacing the MODS terms with DC terms as agreed last year.
  2. to use Googledocs for collaborative editing to overcome the technical problems.
  3. to create a consistent and coherent AP as a basis to address the new AP specification described in the Singapore Framework.
  4. to consider again our use of the “Location” element.
  5. to address a date issue that had been passed to us from the Date Task Group

These conclusions will be drawn up into a new work plan on the wiki with names and dates attached.

Addressing the five aspects of the Singapore Framework.

  1. Functional Requirements: The preamble to the current version of DC-Lib contains several high-level statements of anticipated uses of the profile and it has since been used as the basis of several real-life implementations. Functional requirements should be identified from use cases based on these existing uses.
  2. Domain model. Consider how to use FRBR as our domain model in this context (minimising the number of entities).
  3. Description Set Profile. This is essentially what the current DC-Lib is but it should be modified in the light of the domain model and the separation of the other components in the framework.
  4. Produce DC-Lib usage guidelines from the existing best practice notes in DC-Lib and in consultation with RDA.
  5. Encoding guidelines will be given a lower priority pending the finalisation of the DC XML specification. Also, revisit the existing draft DC-Lib XML schema at that point.

Agenda Item 3. Presentations

To share information about the use of DC metadata in our domain there were presentations from two national libraries and one international library.

  1. Christine Frodl from the National Library of Germany spoke about the KIM project: the Competence Centre For Interoperable Metadata. The project aims to improve, support and promote the use of interoperable metadata in German-language countries.
  2. Haliza Jailani from the National Library Board of Singapore spoke about their use of DC for cataloguing and managing digital resources and for interoperability in resource discovery.
  3. Sally Chambers from The European Library spoke via a live web link from the Netherlands about how The European Library had optimised DC-Lib for use in that portal.

The slides from these presentations are available from the Task Group wiki at [5]

Respectfully submitted, Robina Clayphan Moderator, DCMI Libraries Community