Standardizing vocabulary in Dublin Core

For most systems, Dublin Core(DC) is the lowest common denomenator metadata. Fedora automatically creates DC metadata that can be edited. The program verifies that it is properly constructed DC, otherwise it will not accept the changes. When creating a basic collection based on the University of Hull's documentation, the DC values that need to be present are DC:TITLE, DC:IDENTIFIER (which is generated automatically as the unique identifier [or PID, as it is referred to in Fedora), and DC:DESCRIPTION. What I am going to need to tackle very soon is standardizing what is acceptable entries in each field and notate that in a reference guide -- because I know I can't remember what I just entered for the item before, let alone for the previous collections. Also, for a description, what should be the standard for letting know what an object is? Is it necessary to say that something is a photograph, or will that be inferred? Is there added-value to describing something as a "Photograph of Bibles in a Custom Wood case" versus just saying "Bibles in a Custom Wood case"?

Hmmn...

A new hat...

I have been working for the past couple of weeks with the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA) which was created by Cornell and UVA and can be downloaded from here: http://www.fedora-commons.org/ It is an open source software for housing institutional collections. I've been hitting my head trying to set up collections and test out this software, but thanks to the University of Hull's documentation of developing their RepoMMan project, I have found many helpful tutorials. I can't help but smile at the project's name, too, given that my husband and I just watched the very campy movie from the 80s "Repo Man" just a couple of months back -- Could that be more than a coincidence and old school punk rockers are at the helm? http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/

Right now I've been working on creating implicit and explicit collections. That's what they're really called, which resulted in the collection that I made of my puppy's pictures becoming displayed as "Bichon Frise pictures - Explicit." That will be changed before I run the beta evaluation...

I am not sure if we are going to go with Fedora -- It is very coding extensive, and from where I'm sitting right now, I am the only staffer working on this project. My plan is to work with Fedora for one month, then I get to go to Palinet and learn about ContentDM. I will take each as a representative of an open source vs. turn key DAM and decide which direction I would like to immediately go in for beta testing.

At bare minimum, I am getting the opportunity to 1) visit many online institutional respoitories and see what I like and what they are using 2) Getting to intimately understand Dublin Core, which will most likely be applicable to all future digital asset management work that I will be doing. I quickly am seeing the need for developing standards for controlling what values are acceptable in each Dublin Core field, but that will be one step beyond where I'm at right now...