This guide discusses the layout and content of Dublin Core metadata elements, how to use them in composing a complete Dublin Core metadata record, as well as how to qualify elements to support use by a wide variety of communities. The Dublin Core community recognizes that consistency in creating metadata is an important key to achieving complete retrieval and intelligible display across disparate sources of descriptive records. Inconsistent metadata effectively hides desired records, resulting in uneven, unpredictable or incomplete search results. There is also an extensive glossary of terms related to the Dublin Core and a reference section with a large number of links to bibliographies, specifications, other guidelines and tools, and background reading material going back to 1995. The DCMI Directorate is pleased to announce that An XML Encoding of Simple Dublin Core Metadata has reached Proposed Recommendation status.
Document reflects minor editorial changes.
For non-specialists, it will assist in creating simple descriptive records for information resources. Specialists may find the document a useful point of reference to the documentation of Dublin Core as it changes and grows. The addition of the DC Qualifiers enhances the semantic precision of the existing DC Metadata Element Set. The DCMI Type Vocabulary provides a general, cross-domain list of approved terms that may be used as values for the Resource Type element to identify the genre of a resource. A syntax for writing a list of label values in a text string.