CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI7)

The well-behaved document - Dublin Core inside

Not scheduled

University of Geneva

Poster Poster Session

Speaker

Mr John W. Miescher (Bizgraphic - Geneva)

Description

The well-behaved document - Dublin Core inside A well-behaved document is an electronic document that is both user friendly and library friendly. It has bookmarks and an interactive table-of-contents and includes library-relevant information as part of the electronic document itself. User friendly means a document is easy to read and easy to navigate on any reading device and for which reading software is readily available. It is in an open format and does not depend on proprietary (paid) software for display, styles and multimedia content. It can be searched, has bookmarks (where applicable), an interactive table of contents with links to the correct target page and possibly an index, cross references and links to external resources. It is not encrypted but allows the user to print it out and to copy/paste portions of the text and add bookmarks and comments of his own. This applies not only to scientific papers, monographs and manuals but to all documents that one would consult or refer to rather than read in a continuous stream from cover to cover. Library friendly is a document that has useful embedded metadata which librarians, digital asset managers and individuals can exploit to classify a document with little or no manual intervention and that can be indexed for full-text searching. Some libraries prefer to keep the metadata of their documents in separate repositories for reasons of integrity, but since one does not exclude the other, embedding (a selection of) the same metadata directly into a digital resource, automatically makes this data available to third parties (i.e. authors doing scientific research) who download such resources to preserve locally in their own knowledge base and/or to consult offline. Dublin Core inside The Dublin Core set of standard meta terms or a basic subset thereof in combination with appropriate software is probably the best option to ensure that metadata is applied in a consistent manner and therefore has a better chance to be useful to users, content managers and librarians worldwide. They are already in use in many university and national libraries and they support refinements and namespaces (vocabularies) that can be adapted to the needs of organizations and user groups. The term “Dublin Core inside” could be viewed as a mark of quality for all truly well-behaved electronic documents which must be both user friendly and library friendly per above definitions to be allowed to carry and publicly display this mark. Presentation A chart will be presented showing the workflow of a typical institutional document, highlighting the important savings potential that can be realised if they are planned and implemented from the very beginning with certain aspects of the well behaved document in mind. A little effort for one can reduce or eliminate extra work for another further down the line. This may require some practical education (training, seminars or workshops). Also presented is the new digi-libris manager software for user-friendly documents, a tool that helps to organize collections of physical and digital objects, embed metadata in (existing) electronic documents (PDF, EPUB and HTML) and build tables of contents. The software includes a mini-browser for searching, viewing and downloading web content, bridges for importing metata in MARC 21, MODS, EndNote and other formats and a tool to add bookmarks and interactive tables-of-contents to existing PDF files.

Presentation materials

Poster

OAI7_miescher.pdf