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<font size=3>DSpace uses the Contributor element instead of the Creator
element because this relieves the user of the burden of deciding who, of
all the people involved in the production of an item, is "primarily
responsible" in the creation of the item. We added roles to
contributor, thinking that was more specific than the vague
"creator" field. So we have Contributor. author,
Contributor.editor, Contributor.illustrator...etc. And if anyone
wants to leave it vague, they can use the unqualified Contributor
field.<br><br>
Our guide in this decision was the Libraries Application Profile (LAP) of
the Dublin Core, which was in an early draft stage at the time of DSpace
launching. This draft conflated the Contributor and Creator
elements into one. When the DC Libraries Group published the present
draft of the LAP (officially called DC-Lib), the contributor and creator
elements reappeared as separate elements. However, there is a comment
under both of these elements that states "Creator and Contributor
may be conflated if desired by the application".<br><br>
We left Creator in our schema only because we anticipated that we might
in the future harvest metadata that contains values in the Creator
element, and we wanted to be able to accept that information.<br><br>
As time goes by we see that this decision is proving to be somewhat
inconvenient for metadata harvesters. <br><br>
As for Source, at the time of DSpace launching the LAP (and also the
DCMI) were counseling people not to use Source because it had been
mis-used by some applications, in their opinion. Since
then I have seen its use being recommended again, so it might be time for
us to change that line in our guidelines. This would be fairly
simple. Changing Creator/Contributor would be more
complicated.<br><br>
This is the historical explanation. I'd love to hear more comments
about how to proceed in light of developments to date. <br><br>
Margret Branschofsky<br>
DSpace User Support Manager<br>
Digital Library Research Group<br>
Bldg. 14S-M24<br>
(617)253-1293<br>
margretb@mit.edu<br>
<a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/" eudora="autourl">http://dspace.mit.edu<br><br>
<br>
</a>At 02:48 AM 6/21/2004 +0550, dp007 wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>hi all,<br><br>
dspace recommends not to use the metadata creator and source. it <br>
says "only for harvested metadata". can anyone explain
this?<br><br>
thanks in advance,<br>
regards,<br>
dp<br>
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</blockquote>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Margret Branschofsky<br>
DSpace User Support Manager<br>
Digital Library Research Group<br>
Bldg. 14S-M24<br>
(617)253-1293<br>
margretb@mit.edu<br>
<a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/" eudora="autourl">http://dspace.mit.edu</a></font></body>
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