Improved bibliographic access to Internet documents will only come about through greater co‐operation within the Internet community. Librarians have shown how co‐operation within the library community has provided their catalogue users with ever more powerful access to shelves of books; digital librarians now have the opportunity to participate within the wider information community in enhancing access to the virtual bookshelves of the Web. The Nordic Metadata Project is a prime example of how co‐operation between librarians and other information professionals can take the campaign for better bibliographic access to the Internet one step further.
Nordinfo (the Nordic Council for Scientific Information) has funded the Nordic Metadata Project (1996‐1998) “to create a Nordic metadata production, indexing and retrieval environment.” This final report of the project’s results shows how the Scandinavian information community is co‐operating to build an environment which will allow for systematic access to documents, based on the elements of bibliographic description (metadata) known as the “Dublin Core”. The report writers, themselves heavily involved in its development, chose to base their project on the Dublin Core since this is, apparently, fast becoming established as the standard of bibliographic description for the Internet, and the most universally applicable. An annex of the report sets out the 15 elements of the Dublin Core; there is also included as another annex Rebecca Guenther’s 1997 paper proposing a core set of qualifiers to the 15 core elements; but for those interested in the ongoing development of the Dublin Core itself, the Dublin Core home page at http://purl.oclc.org/dc is the place to go.
What the Nordic project does, then, is to show how it is possible to implement the Dublin Core in the online environment, using a “toolbox” of software developed by the project team. Since the details of the Dublin Core are still being worked on, the project’s toolbox will likewise be subject to further changes, but the current products are promising; indeed, many of them are promising enough to have been made available to everyone through the Web – you can link up to them via the project’s Web site, at http://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta. They are Windows based and designed for the layperson. There is a “metadata template,” which provides boxes in which to record the Dublin Core elements of your document – these can then be converted automatically into HTML 2.0 or HTML 4.0 files for embedding in your document. (As the report points out, a serious problem still is the lack of an approved set of cataloguing rules for the Dublin Core, although unofficial “user guides” are offered as part of the toolbox.) There is also a “metadata harvesting and indexing application” which can index, according to the Dublin Core standard, and retrieve on those Internet documents enriched with metadata. The “Dublin Core to MARC converter” is obviously of particular interest to librarians. The project team has discovered that while feasible, such conversion is not easy, whichever version of MARC is targeted, and that a MARC to DC converter will be even harder to build. Finally, a “URN generator” is provided – the intention is for the Uniform Resource Names to become the ISBNs of the Internet.
The report consists largely of commentary on the development of this toolbox to support the Dublin Core standard. There is still much work to be done on evaluating the tools’ usefulness (an online questionnaire that attracted 21 responses over a nine‐month period is not so impressive); and however useful they may be, this does not make them used – even in Scandinavia, where the metadata campaigners have perhaps been most successful, only a small fraction (well under a tenth) of Web documents are published with attached or embedded metadata, still less with Dublin Core metadata. Nevertheless, this project has developed user‐friendly tools which should indeed encourage everyone, including librarians, to add the necessary metadata to their Web documents. Those libraries which now have their own Web sites, but have not yet investigated how to do this, might find this project’s Web site and toolbox a good starting point. You can browse through the project’s final report athttp://linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/nmfinal.htm, and make use of the links provided therein. Unless you are a Dublin Core fanatic, though, you may find it unnecessary to procure (e.g. by printing out) a hard copy. It may be “final”, but the report is in fact part of an initial stage in the development of a bibliographically improved Internet environment, and as such rightly pleads for an extension of the project (for which Nordinfo has now granted funding).
In the world of the Internet, librarians can only campaign, not control as they are able to control their walled libraries. It is up to each and every individual Web master to heed the call for standardised metadata. However, the profession which has made so accessible shelves of books, should continue to be amongst those who lead the way.
