New draft of OLAC Metadata Set document

[Gary Simons]

Dear community,

I have just posted a new draft of the document describing the proposed
metadata set for the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC).  This is the
foundational document that lays out the standards that participating
archives would follow when generating XML descriptions of their language
resources.  The URL is:

   http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/olacms.html

The main change in this version is that it corrects a serious omission from
the previous version issued April 25.  Due to an error in the stylesheet,
the "Comments" section in the description of each metadata element (which
were present in the April 6 version) came out blank.  When I noticed that
two days ago, I immediately started work on the next draft.  In addition to
reinstating the missing comments, it incorporates a change to Date that
brings it in line with version 0.3 of the XML schema, and makes changes to
the descriptions of Contributor, Relation, and Source that were prompted by
feedback we received following the previous posting of the document.

My apologies to any of you who tried to make use of the previous version
and found that it did not give very much help in determining how to use
each element.  At least this latest version will give you all the
information we have developed. If you still have trouble determining how to
use particular elements, then please give us feedback! Also, take special
note of the "To do" comments in red; if you could give some help in any of
those matter we'd be happy for volunteers!

We hope to hear from some of you. Your participation and feedback is
essential for building a metadata standard taht will truly meet the needs
of our community.

Best wishes,

Gary

________
Steven Bird, University of Pennsylvania (sb at ldc.upenn.edu)
Gary Simons, SIL International (gary_simons at sil.org)
OLAC Coordinators (www.language-archives.org)