We recommend you to read a series of posts published on “The Reinvigorated Programmer” blog, describing different approaches for expressing the same bibliographic data in different standards. The blog author, programmer working on a library-related metasearch system, starting from traditional library catalogue cards, considers how to describe an article from a scientific journal. Trying to use different metadata standards, with a very practical approach, the blogger mercilessly revelas ther weak sides, in most cases related to different levels of interoperability. The entire adventure is described in three parts:
- Bibliographic data, part 1: MARC and its vile progeny
- Bibliographic data, part 2: Dublin Core’s dirty little secret
- Bibliographic data, part 3: Has anyone, anywhere, ever read the whole of the RDA specification?
In the context of Polish digital libraries, the second part is especially interesting, as it focuses on Dublin Core and Dublin Core Terms and in a humorous way it shows their areas of failure.
By the way the author points the “Dumb-down Principle” related with Dublin Core Terms, according to which, qualifiers should be used only to narrow the semantic scope of the qualified element, and not extend this scope. When adding our own qualifiers to the Dublin Core schema, we should do this in a way which, in case when the qualifier part is removed, still allows to reuse the remaining value in a meaningfull way. For example, a qualification of Dublin Core “Publisher” element with the “Place of publishing” qualifier, very popular in Polish digital libraries, is not compatible with this rule.
Besides of the above blog posts, we also recommend you two interesting documents describing the use of Linked Data in libraries (both traditional and digital):
- Article “The Strongest Link: Libraries and Linked Data” from the newest edition of the D-Lib Magazine,
- Short communication recently published by Europeana, titled “Open Linked Data and Europeana”.
First of those texts contains a lot of useful links to tools, systems and standards related to Linked Data and libraries.