BCC01/DCR/1

Interim Report of the Dublin Core Relations Element
“Type” Qualifier Working Group

   Presented by Sherry L. Vellucci, Chair

   Bibliographic Control Committee

            Friday, February 23, 2001
9:00 - 10:30 a.m.
New York City

Working Group Members: Mary Russell Bucknum, Linda Barnhart, Jennifer Bowen, Mari Itoh, Matthew Sheehy, Matthew Dovey (ex officio), Sherry Vellucci, Chair

Whereas the Working Group on International Music Metadata Projects has almost completed their work, the Working Group on the Dublin Core Relations Element Type Qualifiers is just beginning. This allows us to benefit from the output of the International Working Group, especially by using their compiled digital music projects information as the starting point for our own research.

The creation of the Dublin Core Relations Element Type Qualifiers Working Group was in part a response to a paper that I gave last year at the Louisville MLA meeting on bibliographic relationships and their future in the metadata environment. You may recall that my research on bibliographic relationships for music scores identified a variety of music relationships that fall into the seven general categories identified by Barbara Tillett in her research. These include:

            1. Equivalence
            2. Whole-Part
            3. Derivative
            4. Accompanying
            5. Sequential
            6. Descriptive
            7. Shared Characteristics (too broad to study)

When the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) was developed to describe primarily electronic resources, one of the 15 elements created was the Relations element. This was defined as “a reference to a related source.”

The Dublin Core community then decided that for the purpose of defining a “best practice” for using this element, there was a need to define the “types” of relationships more clearly. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), which maintains the metadata scheme, created a working group on the Relation.Type qualifier to develop a list of qualifiers that they judged to be of widespread use. They focused their attention on common qualifiers in order to improve interoperability among disparate user communities. The final list, which is now approved for use, includes the following relationships, expressed in entity/relationship terminology:              

X                                  Is version of / Has version

X                                  Is replaced by / Replaces

X                                  Is required by / Requires

X                                  Is part of / Has part

X                                  Is reference by / References

X                                  Is format of / Has format

The DCMI has declared this list to be open-ended, which means that it may be supplemented by additional Relation Types identified as important to specific user communities.

This brings us to the charge of our working Group, which reads as follows:

            Introduction:

“Of the many metadata standards currently in existence, the Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard has the highest profile and is the most strongly established within the library community.  It is timely and appropriate for music librarians to look more closely at this standard and to evaluate whether Dublin Core is effective in its use for music materials. Of immediate concern (because standards development is in progress, and because the known incidence of bibliographic relationships in music materials is high) is one specific element, the Relations element, and the Type qualifier that is associated with it.”

The Dublin Core "Relations" Element "Type" Qualifier Working Group is charged to:

X                      “look specifically at the Relations element and Type qualifier and study the problems that have been identified so far;

            In order to do this the working group must first:

X                        “compare these (i.e., DC Relation.Types) relationships to those already identified by previous research (i.e., as with analog materials)”

What we know about existing music relationships is almost exclusively from my own research, which was focused on printed scores and their relationships. In order to carry this current research over into the digital electronic music environment, we must first:

X                                  “identify the relationships that exist among digital music materials” and then

X                                 “expand the taxonomy of music bibliographic relationships as necessary to accommodate digital resources.”      

After accomplishing these tasks (which will take several months), the working group will:

X                                  “survey how the Relations element and Type qualifier have been used in non-music projects;”

This part of the project involves examining the lists of relation types that have been identified by other user communities (education, moving image, etc.) and may help us expand our own list of relationship types.

Finally, when this portion of the study is completed, we will broaden our research to look at the other 14 DC elements and their applicability to music and digital music resources.

Considering the amount of work to be done, I request that the Bibliographic Control Committee extend our Working Group for another year.

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Last updated March 14, 2001