CIC-OAI project recommendations
for Dublin Core metadata providers
Version 1.0 06/18/2004
Editors : Muriel Foulonneau & Timothy W. Cole
The Metadata Record
Provide Descriptive Metadata
- It is used for both information discovery and display, so that it must contain information formatted for both purposes.
- For digital objects that are representations or surrogates of physical objects, the descriptive metadata should describe the original physical object. Descriptive metadata specific to the digital surrogate also should be included and the URI of the digital surrogate is placed in the dc:identifier element. The object type is not "Physical object."
Multiply metadata elements
- Do not merge elements when they are distinct in the original metadata record (eg, subject 1 ; subject 2 ...).
- Repeat elements and element content as many times as needed for adequate resource discovery (e.g., The same string may appear once in subject and once in coverage if you think this is necessary).
Access and URI
- A single dc:identifier element shall contain a URI. This URI points to the resource for display purpose, any other URI will have to go to another field. For example, if the URI actually points to the collection's homepage, it can be recorded in the dc:publisher or dc:relation element. Any other dc:identifier element that is not a URI such as ISBN or whatever information is acceptable.
- Make clear whether the end user will access a digital resource or a description of a physical resource (or a finding aid). If there is no existing digital material, make that clear, e.g., by not writing any URI in the dc:identifier element (but rather in another element such as relation or publisher) and/or writing a dc:type physicalobject, possibly additional to any other dc:type.
- Do not create multiple records pointing to the same URI (identifier).
- If your resource is restricted access, this shall be mentioned in the dc:rights (accessRights) element with the designation of the categories of persons who are granted access (written for the benefit of end-users).
Identify the Collection
- Indicate the reference of the collection the item belongs to in the Relation (isPartOf) field.
Display
- For display purpose in the portal, the fields used shall essentially be : title if any + creator + description + subject + type + the identifier corresponding to a URI scheme + relations + collection information, institution and potential access restrictions. The description shall not be formatted for machine-readability, but rather for user information.
The OAI Sets
- The portal focuses on CIC material, so the collection contains material aggregated from other sources, it might be useful to build different sets for those.
- A record can belong to various sets (the setspec element shall be repeated).
- Each set shall have a set description, based on a relevant standard such as MARC, DC Collection.
The OAI Identifier
- The OAI identifier must conform to the URI specification and their length should not exceed 128 characters to be efficiently handled by all kinds of databases and filesystems.
See also Resources aggregation : the filtering process for more information on what the CIC portal does with the metadata
