OLAC Metadata

[Baden Hughes]

It's nice to hear that someone's looking at the reports :-)

The Dublin Core recommendation is now that Role attributes be
associated with Contributor, however, the development of the
OLAC controlled vocabulary pre-dated the DC recommendation.

In fact, the OLAC Role Vocabulary describes attributes which may be
referential to both Creator and Contributor, and these elements exist
independently within OLAC records.

For the reference of others on this list, I'm referring here to:

http://www.language-archives.org/tools/reports/archiveReportCard.php?archive=79

As to why the creator is scored under 'Code Usage': in PARADISEC's case,
where Contributor is only present, then the Creator element is in fact
redundant (hence the 0% score). In other words, in the context of this
particular archive, the OLAC Role vocabulary is only applicable to
Contributor.

However, in other archives where both Creator and Contributor are used,
both with and without the OLAC Role Vocabulary.

While it could be argued that these latter archives are not following
"best practice" as recommended by Dublin Core, its interesting to note
that overall:

http://www.language-archives.org/tools/reports/archiveReportCard.php?archive=all

Creator is used more times than Contributor, but the OLAC Role vocabulary
is much more widely used for Contributor instances.

This type of observation is precisely why the Archive Report card was
developed, to allow archive maintainers to see where best to expend effort
in metadata quality improvment.

Regards

Baden

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Nicholas Thieberger wrote:

> Query from Linda Barwick following a discussion on the 'report card'
> for our metadata set.
>
> >1. creator - why do they score on this under 'Code Usage' when DC
> >recommendation is to use contributor?
> >"Dublin  Core now discourages the use of the Creator element,
> >recommending that all Role information be  associated with
> >Contributor elements." http://www.language-archives.org/REC/role.html
>