Looking at my assigned Dublin Core elements

Date, Creator, Contributor...these will be the Dublin Core elements that my two groupmates and I will be responsible for as part of our LS 566-Metadata digital imaging assignment. It's a pretty interesting grouping, being fairly straight-forward in the type of information being inputted-there's not a huge amount of room for interpretation as opposed to something like the Subject field. Nevertheless, these are some fields where consistency in data entry will be supremely important, as the lack of uniform dating, or author names, for instance, can really wreak havoc for users of the collection. As part of our first task for the assignment, my group was asked to look at the three elements and to discern whether they would be appropriate, or necessary, for the needs of the collection being described. I've included my brief thoughts below.

Date (Art Images)-This is the element I am personally responsible for, and one that I discussed in a little more depth during an earlier blog post. Date would seem to be an essential metadata element for nearly any collection, and is likely to have multiple uses in the description of digital art images, including: item creation date and the date of digitization, as well as the copyright date. The foremost considerations for using the Date element will be the use of a consistent format for date entries, and the question of how the dates can be best associated with the information they represent. The use of qualifiers or refinements, where possible, should significantly help with the latter.

Creator (Football Images)-The Creator element represents the individual or corporate entity responsible for the creation of the item being described, such as the: author, photographer, or artist. This would also seem to be an obvious element to be utilized in the description of digital images, so long as the specific photographer(s) are known. As with Date, the issue of controlling entry terms to ensure consistency will be one of the important considerations when working with the element. Determining a standard order by which Creator names will be inputted would go a long way toward easing our work with this element.

Contributor (Football Images)-My group struggled with trying to determine the relevance of this element to our project. Commonly used for persons or entities such as illustrators, translators, or anyone responsible for adding to the content being described, Contributor may not be needed when dealing with this collection of digital photographs. It is possible that a person responsible for graphically editing the content of the photos, or perhaps their digitization, could be listed under this element, if their identity is known.

So there is a brief rundown if what I will be working on for the digital imaging project. It should be an interesting experience, and I'm especially looking forward to looking at using some elements that will be requiring a bit of authority control in their entry. Looking forward to hearing about how the rest of the class feels about their assigned elements.