Publication of Revised DRI Guidelines for Preparing Metadata

Dublin Core and the Digital Repository of Ireland is the third version of our guidelines for preparing metadata for ingestion into the Digital Repository of Ireland, using the Dublin Core metadata standard. In publishing these guidelines openly, we hope that they will continue to reach beyond the DRI, and provide the groundwork for a cohesive and standardised approach to metadata in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The more we adopt common or standardised metadata practices, the more interoperable our data collections will be, which in turn enables better discovery and reuse of data. We hope that you will consider implementing these guidelines in your institution.

Dublin Core and the Digital Repository of Ireland Version 3 and Qualified Dublin Core and the Digital Repository of Ireland Version 2 have both been revised in response to several changes. In keeping with our ongoing commitment to open access and open data, DRI has become a champion of Open Science/Open Research practices, and has adapted the repository and policies to better support the ingest and maintenance of data along the FAIR principles (research outputs should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). One result is that DRI has integrated support for ORCID identifiers  – a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers/authors from one another. Guidelines for using ORCIDs are included in the latest version of the guidelines. DRI has also become a national aggregator to Europeana, which means that we can perform the step of ingesting the metadata from your collections, if you wish, to Europeana, which should save your organisation time while also significantly increasing the reach and impact of your collections. We hope that you find these updated guidelines useful.

Our guidelines are not intended to modify or replace standard schema, but to aid cataloguers in selecting which metadata elements to include, and to advise on the application of standardised formats and vocabularies.

When choosing Dublin Core or Qualified Dublin Core, cataloguers should refer to these newest versions when preparing metadata for ingest into DRI.

To access Qualified Dublin Core and the Digital Repository of Ireland Version 2 and Dublin Core and the Digital Repository of Ireland Version 3, please go to our Publications page.