CORC and the Dublin Core

The emergence of the Internet as an electronic commons for scholarly, commercial and social discourse has forced upon many communities, libraries included, a new perspective on providing service to users. While our roles as information intermediaries have not changed fundamentally, the ways in which we fulfill those roles are changing dramatically, and nowhere is such change more evident than in cataloging.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has focused the attention of a broad spectrum of communities on description of Internet resources. Begun as an exercise in simplifying resource description for Internet resources, the Dublin Core has become the leading candidate for international, cross-disciplinary description of electronic resources. Pilot projects in many disciplines and translations into 18 languages to date attest to its success in meeting a broad variety of needs.

One target niche for Dublin Core metadata is as a lower-cost, simplified alternative to traditional MARC cataloging, and there are many projects that take advantage of this approach. It is clear that libraries need a Web presence to adequately serve their constituents. For many, if not most Web resources, MARC cataloging is costly overkill, and Dublin Core represents a welcome alternative. However, the coexistence of MARC and Dublin Core requires maintenance of parallel systems and services that imposes other costs, including coping with the burden of rapid evolution that characterizes the Dublin Core initiative.

The CORC project represents an important response to these problems, providing a coherent management approach to Web metadata that addresses many of the problems of the current changing metadata environment. As a major pilot project, CORC focuses substantial resources on the management of this change. Close cooperation and consultation with the Dublin Core Directorate allows changes in the standard to emerge quickly in a formal, large-scale prototype tailored to the needs of libraries, and the rapid deployment of these changes can be fed back to the Dublin Core community to serve a testbed validation role. Libraries can enter metadata in the system with substantial confidence that the integrity of the data will be sustained even as the standard evolves.

Because the underlying representation of the data is independent of either MARC or Dublin Core, the data can be viewed in the manner most appropriate to the user’s context. Similar flexibility of data creation will help advance understanding of the most cost-effective approaches to creating and maintaining resource description stores.

The CORC project is an important milestone in the maturation of the role of libraries in the Internet Commons. It helps to sustain the investment of decades of shared cataloging and extends this model of cooperation into the electronic world of resource description. Additionally, it will be an important vehicle for informing the development of new standards such as Dublin Core, and assuring that both the data and the collective expertise of the library community are well represented in information services delivered through the World Wide Web.--Stuart Weibel is consulting research scientist, OCLC Office of Research.