The UK's Arts and Humanities Data Service, a project of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), has made available the first of a series of Guides to Good Practice. These Guides are intended to "provid[e] the humanities research and teaching communities with practical instruction in applying recognized standards and good practice to the creation and use of digital resources." The first...

Instructional Management Systems (IMS) recently released Meta-data Specification - Version 1 to the public. A collaborative effort between members of the IMS community worldwide and various organizations, the Specification is comprised of three documents, each in HTML or .pdf format. The first, IMS Learning Resource Meta-data Information Model, "describes the names, definitions, organization, and...

The final report of the Nordic Metadata Project is now available in two formats. The collaborative Nordic Metadata Project created an indexing and retrieval system based on the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. The report evaluates the existing uses of metadata, recommends enhancements to the Dublin Core, and discusses three of the project's initiatives: the creation of Dublin Core to MARC...

This Request for Comments (RFC) is the first in a series of Informational RFC's to be produced by the Dublin Core (DC) Metadata Workshop Series. This first RFC provides an introduction to the Dublin Core, "a fifteen-element metadata element set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources." The RFC also presents the consensus reached by librarians, digital library researchers, content...

Dublin Core metadata has been implemented in several ways, including as HTML metatags and as database elements, as it is used in the Scout Archives (discussed in the June 20, 1997 issue of the Scout Report). The DC elements are title, author, subject, description, publisher, other contributor, date, resource type, format, resource identifier, source, language, relation, coverage, and rights...

The Cedars Project, a Higher Education initiative funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, based at Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Leeds, has posted online its "outline specification for metadata to ensure long-term preservation for digital materials." The 33-page .pdf document details the Project's approach to preserving data as part of the Cedars Demonstrator Project and...

National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) recently approved and published this standard set of fifteen metadata elements for resource description. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (discussed in the September 11, 1998 Scout Report) brings together librarians, digital library researchers, content providers, and text-markup experts who...

The Visual Resources Association (VRA) is a membership organization of visual image professionals. These librarians, curators, archivists, publishers, image vendors, art historians, and artists seek to improve the management and expand educational opportunities for all types of image information. They develop useful tools and provide best practice papers to assist less savvy users.

The Version 4.0 metadata element set is based on the principles of Dublin Core (DC) and defines a common set of fields for the standard description of all visual resources. The VRA website also provides mapping information to DC and MARC. The usefulness of these VRA resources makes one wish for more from this Web site. Access to VRA publications, like the Visual Resources Association Bulletin or...

The description section of the OAIster Project offers a detailed introduction of the project and its primary objectives. Standing for Open Archives Initiative, OAIster is an ongoing, collective effort on the part of librarians and other information service professionals to increase access to Web-based resources not currently retrievable by existing search engines. While of critical interest to...