Many years ago, I served on active duty in the military and had the fortune of working on a few short assignments called "special duties." On one of those occasions, I had the fortune of working for a colonel who was well known for his intelligence, and equally well known for his lack of pateince. A sergeant who worked for me, and who had previously worked for the colonel in question told me that the colonel wasn’t as scary as he was rumored to be; the colonel simply assumed that everyone was as smart as the colonel was. He never understood that most people did not see the world in the same way that he did.
Often, I find that those of us who work and live in a digital world tend to behave as this colonel did. We assume that everyone we deal with can see the world in the same digital terms that we do. This is particularly true when it comes to an act as simple as organizing content. As digital people we tend to see content in terms of meta data; finite descriptors about the data that we can use to concenptualize an organizational scheme on the content. The average user, on the other hand, envisions content in a more traditional analog manner; as stacks of paper to be filed in folders and cabinet drawers.
As a result, our efforts to help end users categorize their data in digital terms have a tendency to make the end users feel dumb. It further leaves us wondering why the end user just can’t get it. The divide that grows between those that "get it" and those that don’t grows into long requirements cycles and increased risk to the projects as we implement patterns that we hope will meet the needs of the data.
What is unfortunate about these scenarios, is that neither the technical folks nor the end-users realize that there is a standards body in existence whose purpose has been to provide a starting point for applying meta-data to content in a digital form. The Dublin Core project, started in the mid-90’s foresaw the need to provide a standard from which meta-data may be applied to all digital content.
Based on a set of 15 elements that define the minimal set of meta-data elements that can describe a piece of digital content, the Dublin Core provides adherents with a starting point for defining and understanding meta-data in relation to the content they wish to mark. It is a tool that bridges the gap between those who think in terms of meta-data and those who think in terms of paper files.
For those of us who work with solutions and technologies in which meta-data and content management are central concerns, it is important to take the time to understand the Dublin Core Initiative and the standards that they publish. We can find in these documents a means to be less like the colonel I once knew and more like a trusted advisor to the end-users whom we serve.
Reference: The Dublin Core User’s Guide
