[Dspace-general] metadata: source and creator

[Margret Branschofsky]

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.

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".

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.

As time goes by we see that this decision is proving to be somewhat 
inconvenient for metadata harvesters.

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.

This is the historical explanation.  I'd love to hear more comments about 
how to proceed in light of developments to date.

Margret Branschofsky
DSpace User Support Manager
Digital Library Research Group
Bldg. 14S-M24
(617)253-1293
margretb at mit.edu
http://dspace.mit.edu


At 02:48 AM 6/21/2004 +0550, dp007 wrote:
>hi all,
>
>dspace recommends not to use the metadata creator and source. it
>says "only for harvested metadata". can anyone explain this?
>
>thanks in advance,
>regards,
>dp
>_______________________________________________
>Dspace-general mailing list
>Dspace-general at mit.edu
>http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/dspace-general

Margret Branschofsky
DSpace User Support Manager
Digital Library Research Group
Bldg. 14S-M24
(617)253-1293
margretb at mit.edu
http://dspace.mit.edu 
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