http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/buzz/dublin-core-metadata-initiative/ Recent content in Dublin Core Metadata Initiative on Ariadne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/hopkinson-zargaryan/ Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/hopkinson-zargaryan/ Early writing which first appeared as cuneiform protocols and then emerged in manuscript form and as printed materials is currently entering a new stage in its development – in the form of electronic publications. The Internet has drastically changed our understanding of access to library resources, to publication schemas, and has introduced brand new ways of information delivery. And as a result, the present situation could be described as a continuous increase in the amount of material being published only in electronic form, together with wide-scale conversion of paper-based material to digital formats. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/editorial/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/editorial/ Readers of last year's issues will possibly have been aware of a small initiaitive on Ariadne's part to give practitioners with in the archives field the opportunity to voice their views on developments in their airspace. You may recall in Issue 61 an open and sincere investigation by Michael Kennedy into his views of the wider involvement of non-professionals in the generation of information for archival entries. In Cautionary Tales: Archives 2. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/cetis-stds-2010-rpt/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/cetis-stds-2010-rpt/ The stated intention of this working meeting organised by JISC CETIS, and held at the University of Bolton, UK, on 12 January 2010 was to: '[...] bring together participants in a range of standards organisations and communities to look at the future for interoperability standards in the education sector. The key topic for consideration is the relationship between specifications developed in informal communities and formal standards organisations and industry consortia. The meeting will also seek to explore the role of informal specification communities in rapidly developing, implementing and testing specifications in an open process before submission to more formal, possibly closed, standards bodies. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/chaudhri-et-al/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/chaudhri-et-al/ The development of the Dublin Core Application Profiles (DCAPs) has been closely focussed on the construction of metadata standards targeted at specific resource types, on the implicit assumption that such a metadata solution would be immediately and usefully implementable in software environments that deal with such resources. The success of an application profile would thus be an inevitable consequence of correctly describing the generalised characteristics of those resources. Yet despite the earlier success of application profiles, more recent growth in usage of the DCAPs funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been slow by comparison [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/tonkin-strelnikov/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/tonkin-strelnikov/ The IEMSR, a metadata schema registry, exists to support the development and use of metadata standards; in practice, what does this entail? Metadata is not a recent invention. It dates from at least the time of the Library of Alexandria, at which hundreds of thousands of scrolls were described using a series of indexes retaining various characteristics such as line count, subject classification, author name and biography. However, specific metadata standards, schemas and vocabularies are created on a regular basis, falling into and out of favour as time passes and needs change. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/chaudhri/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/chaudhri/ Efforts to create standard metadata records for resources in digital repositories have hitherto relied for the most part on the simple standard schema published by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [1], the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, more commonly known as 'simple Dublin Core' [2]. While this schema, by and large, met the aim of making metadata interoperable between repositories for purposes such as OAI-PMH [3], the explicit means by which it achieved this, a drastic simplification of the metadata associated with digital objects to only 15 elements, had the side effect of making it difficult or impossible to describe specific types of resources in detail [4]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/tonkin-rvw/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/tonkin-rvw/ The casual visitor to the area of digital library research could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the sheer mass and complexity of the world of metadata, not to mention the speed at which things move on. It is in no sense a rare occurrence, even for those taking an active role in the field, to find that something else has changed and that one has, as they say in other walks of life, 'missed a memo'. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/currier/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/currier/ In 2002 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard (IEEE LOM) [1], superseding the IMS Learning Resource Meta-data specification [2], which had been developed and used through several versions since the mid-1990s. Over the same general period, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) had established the Dublin Core (DC) as a standard for describing all kinds of web-based resources [3]. The Dublin Core Education Working Group [4] emerged as one of several special interest groups [5] developing specific metadata elements [6] for the use of their communities. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/eadie/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/eadie/ Following on from the project to develop an application profile for scholarly works (SWAP)[1], the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has recently funded through its Repositories and Preservation Programme, a series of projects to establish Application Profiles in the areas of images, time-based media, geospatial data and learning objects [2]. The work on the Images Application Profile (IAP) has been carried out for the six-month period from September 2007 to March 2008, and while the substantive project work is now complete and a draft Images Application Profile is in circulation, the ongoing job of promoting the profile to, and consulting with, the image, repository and metadata communities continues. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/newsline/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/newsline/ UkeiG Course: Information Law for Information ProfessionalsInformation Law for Information Professionals: What you need to know about Copyright, Data Protection, Freedom of Information and Accessibility and Disability Discrimination Laws CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE 19 February 2008, 9.30-16.30 Course outline In particular, four key legal areas currently affect the work of many information professionals in the digital environment - copyright, data protection, freedom of information, and disability discrimination and accessibility. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/dc-2007-rpt/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/dc-2007-rpt/ The main theme of this year's international conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications was 'Application Profiles: Theory and Practice' [1]. The conference was hosted by the Singapore National Library Board and held in the Intercontinental Hotel, which was across the road from the superb National Library building. The main conference took place on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The keynote talks and the presentations of full papers took place in plenary sessions. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/ooman-tzouvaras/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/ooman-tzouvaras/ Europe's audiovisual heritage contains both a record and a representation of the past and as such it demonstrates the development of the 'audiovisual culture' we inhabit today. In this article we hope to offer an insight into the development of the Video Active Portal [1] which provides access broadcast heritage material retained by archives across Europe. We will explain how Video Active needed to find solutions for managing intellectual property rights, semantic and linguistic interoperability and the design of a meaningful user experience. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/allinson-et-al/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/allinson-et-al/ In May 2006, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] approached UKOLN [2] and the Eduserv Foundation [3] to collaborate on the development of a metadata specification for describing eprints (alternatively referred to as scholarly works, research papers or scholarly research texts) [4]. A Dublin Core (DC) [5] application profile was chosen as the basis of the specification given the widespread use of DC in existing repositories, the flexibility and extensibility of the DCMI Abstract Model [6] and its compatibility with the Semantic Web [7]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/dc-2006-rpt/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/dc-2006-rpt/ DC-2006 [1], the annual conference of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), took place this year in the city of Manzanillo, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, with a subtitle of ‘Metadata for Knowledge and Learning’. The four-day conference was organised by the University of Colima [2], and the venue for the event was the Karmina Palace Hotel, a large hotel set within its own complex of restaurants, bars, shops and swimming pools. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/chapman/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/chapman/ Cataloguing principles and rules ensure that bibliographic / catalogue records contain structured data about information resources and are created in a consistent manner within the various catalogue and metadata formats. Today ‘catalogues’ (in the widest sense) need to provide access to a wider range of information carriers, with a greater depth and complexity of content. While building on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), the work on Resource Description and Access (RDA) is going back to basic principles and aiming to develop a resource that can be used internationally by a wide range of personnel working in different areas. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/dempsey/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/dempsey/ We have recently come through several decennial celebrations: the W3C, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, D-Lib Magazine, and now Ariadne. What happened clearly in the mid-nineties was the convergence of the Web with more pervasive network connectivity, and this made our sense of the network as a shared space for research and learning, work and play, a more real and apparently achievable goal. What also emerged - at least in the library and research domains - was a sense that it was also a propitious time for digital libraries to move from niche to central role as part of the information infrastructure of this new shared space. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/dc-2005-rpt/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/dc-2005-rpt/ This year's DC Conference took place over four days in the excellent facilities of the University of Carlos III in Leganes, which is a few minutes train ride south of Madrid in Spain. In excess of two hundred people attended coming from 34 countries around the world. As always it was a busy conference with many parallel strands to choose between. The rest of this report therefore covers only a fraction of all the papers and work that happened there: it is a fairly personal selection drawn from some of the sessions I attended. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/newsline/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/newsline/ TASI Offers Workshops over Summer and Autumn Months The JISC-funded Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) is offering a number of workshops in the coming months, of which two below are given as examples. Building a departmental resource 11 August 2005 This workshop aims to demonstrate the steps for creating, maintaining and delivering an image collection. Through a range of hands-on activities, attendees will investigate suitable Image Management Systems (IMS), be introduced to Metadata, and consider its practical application. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/johnston/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/johnston/ The JISC Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) Project [1] is funded by JISC through its Shared Services Programme to develop a metadata schema registry as a pilot shared service for the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE). Partners in the project are UKOLN, University of Bath and the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol. The Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) are contributing to the project in an advisory capacity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/sustain-rpt/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/sustain-rpt/ The conference on the sustainability of Big Lottery Fund projects was attended by about fifty participants from across the country and there were displays by members of the Sense of the South West Consortium, who organised the event. Approaches to SustainabilityThe first speaker was Chris Anderson, Head of Programmes at the Big Lottery Fund, successor to NOF, (New Opportunities Fund). He described the nof-digitise [1] projects, funded to the tune of £50m, as a great experiment. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/godby/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/godby/ A Metadata Standard for Learning ObjectsAs learning objects grow in number and importance, institutions are faced with the daunting task of managing them. Like familiar items in library collections, learning objects need to be organised by subject and registered in searchable repositories. But they also introduce special problems. As computer files, they are dependent on a particular hardware and software environment. And as materials with a pedagogical intent, they are associated with metrics such as learning objectives, reading levels and methods for evaluating student performance. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/erpanet-ids-rpt/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/erpanet-ids-rpt/ Day OneIntroductionWelcome and KeynoteOverview of Persistent Identifier initiativesURNOpenURL - The Rough GuideInfo URIsThe DCMI Persistent Identifier Working GroupThe CENDI ReportARKPURLsOverview of the Handle SystemDOIDay TwoIdentifiers at the Coal FaceEPICURThe National Digital Data Archive (NDA)NBN:URN Generator and ResolverDIVAThe Publisher’s PerspectiveDigital Object Identifiers for Publishing and the e-Learning CommunitiesPublication and Citation of Scientific and Primary DataInformation and the Government of CanadaConclusion This event, organised by ERPANET [1], brought together around 40 key players with an interest in the topic of persistent identifiers in order to synthesize the current state of play, debate the issues and consider what lies on the horizon in this field of activity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/newsline/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/newsline/ The Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) - 24-26 June, TorontoThe Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) is the international meeting for organisations and individuals involved in the preservation and restoration of original image and sound materials. This year, JTS is scheduled to be held in Toronto, Canada, June 24-26, 2004. Preliminary program information is now available on the JTS 2004 website. See: http://www.jts2004.org/english/program.htm For more information please see the website or contact the organization responsible for coordinating the event on behalf of the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA): http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/cdfocus-schema-rpt/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/cdfocus-schema-rpt/ This seminar was aimed at information professionals involved in the policy, development and implementation of services based on collection-level description. Such services use a single record to describe a collection as a unit, rather than recording information about its constituent parts at the item level. There has been a great deal of activity in the United Kingdom in this area since the work carried out by Michael Heaney and UKOLN in 1999 on An Analytical model of collections and their catalogues [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/woldering/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/woldering/ The European Library (TEL) Project [1] completed at the end of January 2004. The key aim of TEL was to investigate the feasibility of establishing a new Pan-European service which would ultimately give access to the combined resources of the national libraries of Europe [2]. The project was partly funded by the European Commission as an accompanying measure under the cultural heritage applications area of Key Action 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/miller/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/miller/ There is, unsurprisingly, an increasing recognition that digital resources of all kinds are eminently suitable to repurposing and reuse. The Iconex Project [1], for example, was funded under JISC's 5/99 Programme to look at the creation, storage and dissemination of reusable learning objects. Service providers of the Arts & Humanities Data Service [2] concern themselves with collecting the digital outputs of scholarly activity in order to preserve them for posterity, but also with facilitating their ongoing use and reuse by learners, teachers and researchers across the community [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/powell/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/powell/ An introduction to the IMS Digital Repositories Working GroupIMS [1] is a global consortium that develops open specifications to support the delivery of e-learning through Learning Management Systems (LMS). (Note: in UK higher and further education we tend to use the term Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in preference to LMS). IMS activities cover a broad range of areas including accessibility, competency definitions, content packaging, digital repositories, integration with ‘enterprise’ systems, learner information, metadata, question & test and simple sequencing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/netlab-history/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/netlab-history/ Actually, that was really the way it was: a cake for the consumption of a group of people interested in the development of digital libraries. It was in 1991, long before this concept had been implanted into the heart of the library community. Indeed long before most people knew about the Internet. At this meeting the first seed for what was going to be NetLab [1] was sown - the multidisciplinary research- and developmental group aimed at digital libraries and global network based information systems. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/netlab-conference/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/netlab-conference/ Every future must have a pastHow did you celebrate your tenth birthday? Perhaps by making a nice birthday cake with all your favourite ingredients to share with your friends? NetLab [1], the research and development department at Lund University Libraries [2], celebrated its tenth anniversary in April 2002 with a three-day conference in Lund, Sweden [3]. This gâteau consisted of topics on digital library development, divided into five pieces: “Semantic web and knowledge organisation”; “Interoperability and integration of heterogeneous sources”; “Visions, future issues and current development”; “The Nordic situation”; and the surprise session “Tension between visions and reality”. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/cld/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/cld/ The UK Collection Description Focus [1] was launched on 1 June 2001. It is a national post, jointly funded for a twelve-month period by the Joint Information Systems Committee/Distributed National Electronic Resource (JISC/DNER) [2], the Research Support Libraries Program (RSLP) [3] and the British Library [4]. The Focus is working towards improving co-ordination on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/miller/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/miller/ In July of this year, Interoperability Focus [1] organised a meeting at the Office of the e–Envoy [2], the Cabinet Office unit responsible for driving forward the UK’s e–Government initiatives. Across an increasing number of initiatives and programmes, there is a growing recognition of the need for common ‘architectures’ within which truly useful applications and services may be constructed. Partly, these architectures form a philosophical basis within which developments may be undertaken. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/robinson/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/robinson/ The UK Collection Description Focus (1) was launched on 1 June 2001. It is a national post, jointly funded for a twelve-month period by the Joint Information Systems Committee/Distributed National Electronic Resource (JISC/DNER) (2) , the Research Support Libraries Program (RSLP) (3) and the British Library (4). The Focus aims to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/inhale/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/inhale/ The Information for Nursing and Health in a Learning Environment (INHALE) Project [1] at the University of Huddersfield is one of forty-four projects supported nationally by the JISC as part of the DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource) learning and teaching development programme [2]. INHALE is creating portable, interactive learning materials for nursing and health students for use within a virtual learning environment such as Blackboard ©. The two year project, which commenced in September 2000, is using the ubiquity of the web to produce a series of units, each of which will help users to acquire the necessary skills to find and use quality information sources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/metadata/ Fri, 23 Mar 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/metadata/ This article proposes a mechanism for embedding machine parsable citations into Dublin Core (DC) metadata records [1] based on the OpenURL [2]. It suggests providing partial OpenURLs using the DC Identifier, Source and Relation elements together with an associated 'OpenURL' encoding scheme. It summarises the relevance of this technique to support reference linking and considers mechanisms for providing richer bibliographic citations. A mapping between OpenURL attributes and Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) [3] elements is provided. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/meg/ Fri, 23 Mar 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/meg/ As Pete Johnston illustrates elsewhere in this issue [1], e-Learning is big business, and likely to get bigger. Figures quoted in the recent report to the US Congress from the Web Based Education Commission [2], for example, place the current value of US-based 'formal' education at all levels at $2.5 Billion, and estimates growth to nearly $14 Billion by 2003. In the corporate sector, the figures are even more impressive, estimated at $1. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/app-profiles/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/app-profiles/ BackgroundThis paper introduces application profiles as a type of metadata schema. We use application profiles as a way of making sense of the differing relationship that implementors and namespace managers have towards metadata schema, and the different ways they use and develop schema. The idea of application profiles grew out of UKOLN’s work on the DESIRE project (1), and since then has proved so helpful to us in our discussions of schemas and registries that we want to throw it out for wider discussion in the run-up to the DC8 Workshop in Ottawa in October. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/interoperability/ Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/interoperability/ Together with terms like "metadata" and "joined-up thinking", this word is increasingly being used within the information management discourse across all of our memory institutions. Its meaning, though, remains somewhat ambiguous, as do many of the benefits of "being interoperable". This paper is an attempt, written from the doubtless biased perspective of someone with the word in their job title, to explain some of what interoperability means, and to begin stating the case for more active efforts towards being truly interoperable across a range of services. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/search-engines/ Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/search-engines/ In the courses that I run on Internet searching people often express concern, surprise or plain puzzlement at the way in which search engines relevance rank the results that they return. Consequently, I thought that it might be interesting to cover this subject in the column. Why rank pages? The search engines that are what I call 'free text' search engines will, in general terms, be much more comprehensive than those that provide access to websites via a directory or index. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/metadata/ Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/metadata/ In May 1997, the present author produced a short article for this column entitled "Extending metadata for digital preservation" [1]. The article introduced the idea of using metadata-based methods as a means of helping to manage the process of preserving digital information objects. At the time the article was first published, the term 'metadata' was just beginning to be used by the library and information community (and others) to describe 'data about data' that could be used for resource discovery. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/planet-sosig/ Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/planet-sosig/ The purpose of this article is to introduce The Question Bank contents and situate the resource in the context of its Information Space, that is its relationship to other projects that aim to make social surveys more accessible. I have the subsidiary aim of using this text to present the choices and decisions that need to be identified, preferably before undertaking the introduction of a medium sized web-based information resource. I aim to be decidedly non-technical, however many of the problems the Question bank team has overcome have been solved because of the increasing flexibility that newer software offers. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/metadata/ Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/metadata/ The Metadata Workshop held in Luxembourg on the 12 April was the third in an ongoing series of such meetings. The first Metadata Workshop was held in December 1997 and included a tutorial on metadata provided by UKOLN, some project presentations and break-out sessions on various metadata issues [1, 2]. The second workshop, held in June 1998, concentrated more on technical and strategic issues [3]. Around 50 people attended the third workshop, mostly drawn from organisations involved in European Union funded projects supplemented by a few Commission staff.