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.

With over a billion Web pages (not to mention newsgroups and forums) on the Internet that cover virtually every topic under the sun, online searching can become quite tedious. Therefore, in order to access relevant data on the Internet within a reasonable amount of time, both Web site developers and Internet users need to be cognizant of the tools available for online knowledge management....

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...

Announced this week by the Getty Standards Program, Version 2.0 of Introduction to Metadata: Pathways to Digital Information has been placed online in its entirety. This revised version includes updated essays and a new piece on metadata "crosswalks." The crosswalk of metadata standards from version 1.0 (including MARC, Dublin Core, CDWA, Object ID, and the CIMI schema) has been updated and four...

The digital catalog of any library, archive, or museum relies on metadata (data about data) to enable searchers to get the most relevant results. As more institutions digitize their collections, a vast amount of metadata needs to be generated. But can metadata generation actually be fun? That's the premise behind Metadata Games, an "open source crowdsourcing game platform" that offers a collection...

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...

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...