Dublin Core Metadata Element Set: Reference Description

This document is the reference description of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, as elaborated in the report on the OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop of March 1995 and subsequently modified by working groups constituted at the OCLC/UKOLN Metadata Workshop of April 1996.

Element Descriptions

• Title

  The name given to the work by the author or publisher.

• Subject

  The topic of the work, or keywords that describe the content of the work.

• Author

  The person(s) primarily responsible for the intellectual content of the object.

• Publisher

  The organization responsible for making the work available in its present form. Generally a publisher, an institution (university department, for example) or a corporate entity.

• Other Agent

  The person(s) other than author(s) who have made other significant intellectual contributions to the work (for example, editors, transcribers, illustrators, convenors).

• Date

  The date the work was made available in its present form.

• Object Type

  The genre of the object, such as home page, novel, poem, working paper, technical report, essay, dictionary, etc.

• Form

  The data representation of the object, such as text/html, ASCII, Postscript file, Windows executable file, etc.

• Identifier

  String or number used to uniquely identify the object. Examples for networked resources include URLs, URNs (when implemented). For non-networked objects, one might have an ISBN, Library of Congress Catalog Number, or other formal name.

• Source

  Object, either print or electronic, from which this object is derived, if applicable. For example, an html encoding of a Shakespearean sonnet might identify the paper version of the sonnet from which the electronic version was transcribed.

• Language:

  Language of the intellectual content of the object.

• Relation:

  Relationship to other objects.

• Coverage

  The spatial locations and temporal durations characteristic of the object .