Philip Davis asks:
Does the DC community regard metadata supplied by a creator or publisher in a 'header' as a more important source of information than the title screen?
No, not really. DC is pretty agnostic about where the data comes from, and has no intrinsic requirements for fullness of data or the use of specific (or any) content standards. Essentially the question of exposing the source of the information requires either external documentation (like an application profile, which defines usage within a particular community or project) or some link within the syntactical binding to administrative information about the data (OAI-PMH supports some of this), and a few providers have gone quite far with it. MARC data, on the other hand, carries most of its administrative data within each record, and there's an assumption, perfectly acceptable within a closed world but problematic in a more open one, that the data was created using AACR2 (or earlier) rules. In qualified DC, the use of controlled vocabularies is supported in much the way MARC does it, by indicating the source of the value used, but MARC definitely exposes traditional library vocabularies (like LCSH) using a different technique than other vocabularies. This is pretty much a historical thing, and when they ran out of indicators, started using the $2 technique. That was useful, but it does certainly make use of MARC data by non-library applications a bit challenging. This whole question about how much information one needs to know to interpret the data in a metadata record, and how to supply consuming applications with that data is something I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about over the past few years. In general I think we're better off exposing that information directly and explicitly, rather than indirectly, as we have done in the past in libraries. Diane -- *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Diane I. Hillmann Research Librarian Cornell University Library Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice: (607) 387-9207 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
