Dublin Core use in libraries: a survey

An e‐mail survey was conducted by the Dublin Core Libraries Working Group to collect examples of Dublin Core use in libraries, and to provide input for the development of a Dublin Core application profile for libraries. A total of 29 responses were received from nine countries, describing 33 separate implementations of Dublin Core. The most commonly cited reasons for selecting Dublin Core were its international acceptance, flexibility and likelihood of future interoperability. Each of the 15 core elements was in use by between 59 percent and 97 percent of the projects in the survey. There was a high incidence (73 percent) of projects that use metadata elements in addition to the DC elements and approved qualifiers. The two most widely reported challenges involved in implementing Dublin Core were that there are too few elements and qualifiers, and the lack of usage guidelines.