Hi – I’m new to the DC schema and trying to understand how the Dublin core fields should relate to item-type specific fields in an Omeka instance.
For example – in the Dublin Core documentation it seems like “Interviewer” and “Interviewee” for an Oral History could both go in DC:Creator fields, one tagged “Interviewer” and one tagged “Interviewee”. Or “Birth date” for a Person item could go in the DC:Date field, or in the “Birth date” field on item type Person, or in both places. But as far as I can tell Omeka doesn’t support setting tags for DC fields at all, so I’m not sure what to do…
Should I be duplicating information in the DC fields that already exists in item type-specific fields, or only store it in the item type fields?
The Dublin Core schema is abstract by design. It’s up to you to define what the fields mean in the context of your project. Item type fields typically refine DC, as you’ve noticed, but these refinements aren’t explicit. So we recommend that you a) define your DC fields, and b) duplicate information from item type fields to DC fields.
To avoid ambiguity, I’d choose either “Interviewer” or “Interviewer” to be DC:Creator, not both. The same goes for DC:Date, etc. Check to see if whatever domain you’re working in has metadata best practices.
Thanks that’s helpful! Will do. Do you know if there’s any idea in the pipeline for Omeka to allow tagging DC fields?
Doing something like that would quickly lead into quagmires for generalizing things. It sounds like you are talking about an inference mechanism based on what’s ‘tagged’ in one way or another. The trouble is that different workflows want or need different inference flows. That’s super hard to do, and could very easily lead to more confusion than help in general.