[Dspace-general] Dublin Core Registry quesion: creator, contributor.author, etc.

[Jose Blanco]

So the question now is, when is 1.4 going to become available?  I just
searched the tech archive and could not find an answer.  Any idea?

Thanks!

-----Original Message-----
From: dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu]
On Behalf Of Tansley, Robert
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 5:04 PM
To: Jim Ottaviani; dspace-general at mit.edu
Subject: Re: [Dspace-general] Dublin Core Registry quesion:
creator,contributor.author, etc.

> Hello to the list, and particularly the folks who initially 
> created the 
> DC Registry for DSpace:
> 
> I have a Dublin Core related question: Why was "creator" 
> (creator.null) 
> reserved only for use by harvested metadata?

Ah, this old chestnut! :-)

The reason contributor.author is used by default is that the DSpace (as
shipped) DC profile was based on an early draft of the DC Library
Application Profile (DC-LAP,
http://www.dublincore.org/documents/2004/09/10/library-application-profi
le/) which recommended using contributor.XXX instead of creator for the
primary author.  I believe (I could be wrong) the initial reasoning
behind this was that often, the *author* of the work (the person who
wrote the words) might be different from the *primary creator of the
electronic resource*, for example the PDF, the scan of the photograph
etc.  However in later versions of the profile, usage of creator was
brought more in line with expectations and its uses in other profiles.

We should probably fix it so that DSpace as shipped uses the up-to-date
library application profile.  For existing installations, it will be a
little trickier to migrate/crosswalk metadata in their current profiles
to a newer version of the profile.  Many people have added their own
extensions to the shipped DSpace profile, so writing a universal
migration tool isn't easy -- such a tool needs to be very configurable.

In any case, the situation will be better in DSpace 1.4 for a number of
reasons:

- All of the fields used in submission, search, browse and item metadata
display views will be fully configurable, so for new installations you
are free to determine and use your own profile or the most up-to-date
LAP, and decide which fields appear as 'author' etc.

- Descriptive metadata can now be added for any flat schema/namespace,
and configured as described above.  Although this doesn't enable
"structured" metadata (for which storing in XML bitstreams is still the
recommended approach), it does mean that when people have extra metadata
requirements that aren't met by DC-LAP, they can pick elements from
other namespaces or create their own namespaces, so that non-standard
metadata elements can be distinguished from standard DC-LAP elements.

So all we need is a volunteer to create a configurable tool to crosswalk
metadata in live installations to a more recent/standard profile!

Rob

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