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 experts, and text-markup experts from around the world on the semantics of each of the fifteen elements (descriptors). The DC elements are title, author, subject, description, publisher, other contributor, date, resource type, format, resource identifier, source, language, relation, coverage, and rights management.