6 What is DublinCore?
Dublin Core is an internationally standardized set of broad metadata categories meant to help organize digital content, though the categories used can also be used to describe physical items and collections. Dublin Core is not discipline-specific and can be used for many genres of texts throughout platforms and systems across the internet. It was created with the goal of making a broad standard for kinds of information stored on the internet that would be usable and adaptable as the internet continued to change at a rapid pace. Recordkeepers have since developed discipline-, genre-, and medium-specific guidelines for creating metadata in Dublin Core, but for our purposes, we will be sticking with the basics. The categories of Dublin Core are meant to serve as a guide to developing metadata for resources and collections that are helpful to users and recordkeepers. The categories are not always applicable to every item, or some items will not have the explicit information needed to fill each of the categories. They are meant to be adaptable; not every category needs to be used for each record that is being created.
The categories that are part of Dublin Core are: contributor, coverage, creator, date, description, format, identifier, language, publisher, relation, rights, subject, title, type, and source. Not all of the categories are required for each item’s metadata; rather, some or all can be used depending on the text, what the categories the recordkeepers know or have decided to use, and what the user viewing, using, and/or citing the item might need to know. Your institution may have specific guidelines of what should be provided in a metadata record.
This rest of this section provides information about each of the primary categories of Dublin Core. Each category provides questions that might be considered when trying to fill out metadata for each category. The questions are not an end-all-be-all list; there are likely other questions you’d want to consider based on the item, the collection, the user, the institution, or other factors that contribute to the item you are creating metadata for. As you’re learning, it may be helpful to refer back to the three types of metadata listed in the “What is Metadata” section and fill out one “type” of metadata at a time.