Metadata

Image of a Dublin pub
Image of a Dublin pub

Information about a resource, often describing its provenance, format, ownership, location, history of modification, keywords, short description. The Dublin Core specification is most commonly used in Digital Humanities to ensure that resources are described using a standardised common taxonomy. Within this, researchers may create their own “controlled vocabularies” to standardise the terms they use to describe resources for their research.

The original DCMES Version 1.1 consists of 15 metadata elements, defined this way in the original specification:

  1. Contributor – “An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource”.
  2. Coverage – “The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant”.
  3. Creator – “An entity primarily responsible for making the resource”.
  4. Date – “A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource”.
  5. Description – “An account of the resource”.
  6. Format – “The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource”.
  7. Identifier – “An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context”.
  8. Language – “A language of the resource”.
  9. Publisher – “An entity responsible for making the resource available”.
  10. Relation – “A related resource”.
  11. Rights – “Information about rights held in and over the resource”.
  12. Source – “A related resource from which the described resource is derived”.
  13. Subject – “The topic of the resource”.
  14. Title – “A name given to the resource”.
  15. Type – “The nature or genre of the resource”.