Metadata

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) convened the invitational Metadata Workshop on March 1-3, 1995, in Dublin, Ohio, to attempt to define a simple metadata record that sufficiently describes a wide range of electronic objects. Fifty-two librarians, archivists, humanities scholars, and geographers, as well as standards makers in the Internet, Z39.50, and Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) communities, attended the workshop. They sought to identify the scope of the problem, to achieve consensus on a list of metadata elements that would yield simple descriptions of data in a wide range of subject areas, and to lay the groundwork for further progress in defining metadata elements that describe electronic information.