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IESR Metadata Review December 2007

Ann Apps, 2007-12-06

This is an interim metadata review, which lists a few new changes. Issues outstanding from the February 2007 review are not addressed

Summary: Status of reviewed metadata

Metadata Changes in this Version

  • 1.1 New property iesr:madeAvailableBy with encoding scheme a new controlled list iesr:MadeAvailList
  • 1.2 Collection owner optional for IESR
  • 1.3 New entry in iesr:ItemTypeList 'LearningResource'
  • 2.1 Additional encoding scheme for 'Domain Available' 'IPRange'

1 Collection Metadata

1.1 Made Available By

[Add this property, and an associated controlled list]

Add an optionable, repeatable, searchable Collection property: iesr:madeAvailableBy. The purpose of this property is to capture where an organisation makes a collection available, or recommends it, to its community. This is needed for organisations like JISC and the NHS who are proposing using IESR as a collection management tool, so that they can pick out resources in their collection on a search. Hence the field will be searchable. It needs to be repeatable because the same resource could potentially be included by several organisations. (It is probable that IESR will need to add this to some existing records.)

The value of this property will be a name from a controlled list. This is an authoritative list maintained by IESR, so that an organisation will request addition to it. It may seem better to use the organisation's URI as the value of this property, but this would cause searching problems for humans, searcing on parts of a URI not being supported.

1.2 Collection Owner

[Yes]

Make Collection owner optional for IESR (it is already optional in general use of the IESR metadata schema). Although the underlying collection description model includes the concept of a collection owner and regards it as necessary, it is not clear that this is a particularly useful property for the practical use of IESR. It adds to the burden of cataloguing Collections and linking various entities. People should be encouraged to include Owner if it is significant. But they should not include Owner if there is no clear owner other than the service administrator.

1.3 Item Type

[Add 'LearningResource' to the IESR vocabulary as a possible value of itemType]

Add a new Item Type to the IESR item type list: LearningResource. There is currently no way of recording this, and it is significant in some contexts. DC Type does have InteractiveResource, but that is not exactly the same thing - it is not necessarily for learning, and a learning resource does not have to be interactive.

1.4 Selection by Type

These are comments recorded here in order to document them

A library catalogue (OPAC) is a Collection of type 'Catalogue' that has a Z39.50 service.

Open Access Collections are those that have a service of type 'webpage' that has Access Control 'none'.

2 Service Metadata

2.1 Domain Available

[Add another encoding scheme: IP range]

Add an alternative encoding scheme for Domain Available to capture an IP range. An application may wish to choose an appropriate service for a user based on their IP address.