"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

The UK is at the forefront of the development of common global standards for the Internet and has played a pivotal role in the development and adoption of the Dublin Core. Since 2004, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have jointly been formally involved in the development of the standard as the UKAffiliate of the DCMI.

UKOLN, a centre of expertise in digital information management, based at the University of Bath and funded jointly by MLA and JISC, was one of the early advocates of the Dublin Core. As part of the UK affiliation, UKOLN acts as adviser on the implementation and technical development of the standard in the UK. An annual report on the UK affiliation is produced every year.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an organisation dedicated to promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards and developing specialised metadata vocabularies for describing resources that enable more intelligent information discovery systems. DCMI is the maintenance agency for theDublin Core standard (ISO 15836), the most widely used international standard for metadata description, and is responsible for its development, standardisation and promotion.

Dublin Core has had a strong international focus since its inception, based on the perspective that resource discovery is intrinsically an international, multi-cultural, multilingual activity. As DCMI has evolved from an initial exploratory workshop to a workshop series, and then an international conference series and a standards maintenance organization, its management and governance has had to change to reflect this development. DCMI now aims to reflect and project the objectives, values, and culture of its constituents, to share equitably the costs of managing the standard and the program of work and to assure the independence of the initiative, through the DCMI Affiliate program.

Affiliates provide an important link between DCMI as a worldwide activity and the local and regional activities of practitioners. They promote the adoption of Dublin Core specifications and help assure the availability of authoritative documentations and maintain translations of base DCMI standards and documentation as appropriate for the locale. Affiliates can help focus a local concentration of expertise to promote deployment and development of DCMI metadata and architectures within the context of a given locale and language environment. As local custodians of the DCMI brand, Affiliates are a critical link in promoting DCMI standards through educational and training offerings, as well as bringing local concerns to the attention of the larger metadata community, thereby improving the international coherence of the overall architecture and semantic content of metadata.