Cross-domain use of metadata -- reports available for comment

[Paul Miller]

Afternoon all, and apologies for cross-posting,

In an effort to explore the issues behind creating a
network-based (distributed) cross-domain interdisciplinary service for the
Arts & Humanities, the UK's Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS) and
Office of Library and Information Networking (UKOLN) recently convened a
series of workshops where participants addressed:

	- requirements for resource discovery within the discipline
	- current resource description/discovery practices
	- fitness of Dublin Core for resource discovery within the
	  discipline

In each domain-specific workshop, participants were drawn from within the
domain, and were asked to consider likely needs, both within a service for
the domain itself and for a domain-spanning service such as the AHDS,
where the issues are slightly different.

These workshops addressed the important subject of resource discovery, and
explored the issues behind use of metadata to describe electronic
resources in such a way that they might effectively be located and
retrieved within a cross-domain interdisciplinary environment such as that
of the AHDS.

Although focussed upon the Arts & Humanities, it is intended that the
workshop findings will have value more widely within the electronic
libraries sphere, where several projects are concerned with describing or
locating resources in an electronic environment.

DRAFT reports from each AHDS Service Provider are now available on
the web:

http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ahds/project/metadata/res_dev_wrkshp1.html
(Archaeology)

http://hds.essex.ac.uk/metadata/draft_report01.html (History)

http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/reports/metarep1.html (electronic text)

http://pads.ahds.ac.uk/mu_rep.html (digital sound resources)

http://pads.ahds.ac.uk/mi_rep.html (moving image resources)

http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/Metadata1.html (visual arts and cultural heritage).

Each report is available in draft form until the end of July, at which
time comments will be incorporated into finalised versions of the reports.

AHDS would welcome comments from as wide a cross-section of the community
as possible in the time available, and invites you to look at those
reports of interest and submit comments to their authors.

Comments on the series as a whole should be addressed to me in the first
instance.

Thanks,

Paul

  == paul miller ================== collections at ads.ahds.ac.uk ==
   collections manager, archaeology data service, king's manor
   york, YO1 2EP, UK                  tel: +44 (0)1904 43 3954
  == http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ahds/ ==== fax: +44 (0)1904 43 3939 ==