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CIMI Dublin Core Metadata Testbed

The CIMI Dublin Core (DC) Metadata Tetsbed working group convened in October 1997 to plan a project which became the DC Testbed in mid-1998. Three underlying ideas were articulated during project planning, and these testable assumptions served to focus the scope of work:

• DC is useful to describe artifacts and associated information resources in the museum community

• DC is simple to learn and easy to use

• Adequate technical infrastructure exists to support use of DC for resource discovery.

Eighteen member organizations from 8 countries participated in Phase 1 of the DC Testbed. The team comprised an ideal mix of access providers, software vendors and technical support personnel, and content providers. After creation of more than 300,000 records using the 15 DC unqualified elements, participants agreed that consensus on interpretation of the 15 elements' definitions and standardization of application guidelines ultimately would be more valuable for CIMI, the cultural heritage community, and other Dublin Core stakeholders than identifying the need for DC qualifiers and extensions. Investigating qualified DC would be done in Phase 2.

The testbed showed that DC Simple can be used for description of museum objects. There are the expected problems with reducing a rich descriptive set to DC without qualifiers but these can be overcome and consensus reached. Further work with qualified DC and user testing is contemplated for 1999.

For information <www.cimi.org>.


CIMI DC Metadata Testbed Participants.

Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), UK.

Australian Museums On Line (AMOL), Australia

Blue Angel Technologies, Inc., USA

Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), Canada

CIMI Executive Director

DSTC Pty Ltd, Australia

Databasix Information Systems B.V., Netherlands

Erin Stewart, CIMI Dublin Core Testbed Project Manager, Editor

Finsiel S.p.A., Italy

Gallery Systems, Inc., USA

Joanneum Research Institute, Austria

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, USA

Museum Documentation Association, UK

National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, USA

The National Museum of Denmark, Denmark

Natural History Museum-Kansas, USA

The Natural History Museum-London, UK

University of California-Berkeley, Museum Informatics Project (MIP),

Walker Art Center and The Minneapolis Institute of the Arts: Integrated Arts Information Access Project, USA

Willoughby Associates Inc.

webmgr@cni.org