In this article Amy Tracy Wells, Coordinator of the Scout Report Signpost, discusses metadata and its application to the cataloging of Internet resources. The article also discusses the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and its metadata standards.

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 European Treasury Browser (ETB) Project has recently released a multilingual thesaurus available in eight languages: Danish, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. The thesaurus is "aimed at indexing educational resources" and building an "interoperable infrastructure to exchange and network metadata on educational resources for schools in Europe." The project seeks to...

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 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...

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...

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification, a creation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is one of the most exciting new Web technologies to be inching its way into existence. RDF is a basis for encoding and using data about documents or Web pages which purports to facilitate the automation of their processing. This RDF Model and Syntax Specification document has...

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification, a creation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is one of the most exciting new Web technologies to be inching its way into existence. RDF is a basis for encoding and using data about documents or Web pages which purports to facilitate the automation of their processing. More information about this important technology can...