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On May 26, 2005, at 6:07 PM, Robert Tansley wrote: > The question is, would it be useful to include the Dublin Core in its > own > <dmdSec>, and have the extended metadata (with a separate XML schema) > in a > separate <dmdSec>? My initial suspicion was that having separate > <dmdSec>s > would be useful because: > Separating the DC from the non-DC metadata makes it slightly easier for software that only understands DC to extract that and process it while ignoring the things it doesn't understand. It can also be useful if you're doing something like OAI-PMH, as you can just grab the DC record for an object and feed it out through OAI without worrying about other metadata clutter in the same record. Validation actually I don't think is that big a deal; you're already dealing with a multi-namespace schema validation. You'd have a bit more wrapping with additional namespaces involved if you're going to drop both DC namespace and other namespace elements in one dmdSec, but since your software already has to handle multi-namespace validation, that's not really an issue. The bigger issue is the one Brian mentioned, that you have to write your own schema to pull in both DC and non-DC elements. On the other issue you raise: > I'm also wondering whether the presence of two <dmdSec>s could confuse > people. Both <dmdSec>s relate to the object as a whole, rather than an > individual file or group of files. Also, they are complementary. > That is, > in order to get all the descriptive metadata about the object, you > need the > contents of both; this is a different situation to where one dmdSec is > a > crosswalk of the other (e.g. where one <dmdSec> has Dublin Core, and > another > has "the same" metadata crosswalked into MODS). Does the presence of > two > <dmdSec>s imply or suggest anything? Or is it purely up to the > particular > profile/use of METS? > > I guess I'm just wondering whether there is a best practice or any > advantage > to one approach over the other. Any comments welcome... > The presence of two <dmdSec>s doesn't imply anything. Best practice here is to create a METS profile and register it so that people know what your intent is in having two <dmdSec>s in one record. Jerome McDonough Digital Library Development Team Leader Elmer Bobst Library, New York University 70 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012 (212) 998-2425 [log in to unmask]