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Re: DC in human-readable form?



Eli Naeher wrote:
> I would like to use Dublin Core to describe each pamphlet.  It's trivial
> to add the DC to the HTML file (each pamphlet will have a catalog page on
> the site), but is there a way to make that metadata display on the page
> without simply re-entering it in the body of the HTML by hand?  Or some
> better way altogether to go about this?

You may want to use some kind of references to the Dublin Core values within the META tags and the
HTML body, rather than including the values themselves.  The exact approach for doing so would depend
on what software is being used on the server, e.g. Cold Fusion, Microsoft ASP or various other options
on Apache.

In any case, the idea would be to store the Dublin Core elements in a separate file or database and
then just provide pointers to those values from within the HEAD of the pages to include them as META
tags and then again within the BODY of the pages to include them as part of the viewable text.

There are several good reasons to create and manage DC metadata in a separate file that's associated
with a page through a
 <LINK REL="metadata" HREF=""> reference within the HEAD, rather than coding all the metadata directly
into the HTML as META elements.

This is the approach taken by the DC site itself
http://www.dublincore.org

You don't necessarily have to use a bunch of elaborate XML or RDF encoding in order to adopt the LINK
REL and server-side scripting approach.

You may want to search the archives of DC-General
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-general.html
or one of the other Dublin Core mailing lists
http://dublincore.org/groups/mailinglists.shtml

You could also try posing your question to DC-General or one of the other lists.

I think you may find that the right approach will depend on how many files you have to work with (hand
copying for 20 pamphlets probably isn't a big deal, but it would be for 10,000 pamphlets) and what
sort of support you have for fiddling with files on your server.  If you have an Apache server with
support for server-side include, for example, you just have to make sure that you name the files
correctly and then embed references to those files between comment tags in the HTML.  There are
serveral good tutorial documents on the Web for using server-side includes.  This approach will
require you to do a bit more up-front work, but it may pay off if you have a lot of pamphlets and you
want to possibly reuse the Dublin Core elements for some other purpose in the future.

=========================================================
 Cal Lee
 University of Michigan             Phone: 734-647-0505
 School of Information
 http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~calz/
   "To the extent that archival organizations are concerned
    with current record practices and the content of future
    holdings, they cannot long delay plans for appraising,
    accessioning, and servicing this new [computer] media
    of communication."
                                  - Meyer Fishbein, 1970

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