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Title:
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Dublin Core Collection Description
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Creator:
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Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group
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Date Issued:
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2004-08-18
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Identifier:
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Replaces:
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Is Replaced By:
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Not applicable
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Latest Version:
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Status of Document:
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This is a DCMI Working Draft.
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| Description of Document: | This document presents a proposal from the Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group for a new collection-specific element, accrualPolicy. |
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The Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group is developing a a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) for collection-level description, i.e. for the description of a collection itself as a resource, rather than the description of each of the individual items that make up that collection. The work adopts a broad definition of a collection and is seeking to develop a schema which is applicable to a wide range of collections.
One of the requirements is to provide information about whether and how items are added to a collection. Such information can provide indications of the significance and the currency of a collection. Three distinct but related categories of information have been identified:
While these attributes are related, they are sufficiently distinct to be represented using three separate properties that can be used to make distinct statements about the collection.
No existing properties in the DCMI vocabularies support the capture of this information. It is not covered by dc:description since this information deals with the process of adding items, rather than with the content of the collection (or of the items within the collection.
This property allows statements to be made about the policy governing accruals to the collection, i.e. the approach the collector adopts to adding items to the collection.
This property supports searches of the form
Find collections that have an Accrual Policy corresponding to a specified value (e.g. active)
It also allows a user to obtain a value for Accrual Policy for a known collection, or to compare values for collections that have been discovered according to some other criteria.
Furthermore, the use of a vocabulary encoding scheme provides a list of unambiguous values for the property, and supports the construction of precise operations on metadata using this property. The property could be used with other encoding schemes or with free text values.
| Name | accrualPolicy |
| Label | Accrual Policy |
| Definition | The policy governing the addition of items to a collection. |
| Comment | Recommended best practice is to use a value from the DCCD Accrual Policy encoding scheme. |
| Examples |
The Accrual Policy for a library subject collection for which new books and journals are bought:
The Accrual Policy for a special collection to which items are added only of they are donated or deposited by an external agent:
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| Type of term | Element |
| Term qualified | [n/a] |
| Why needed |
Information about the conditions under which items are being added to a collection helps a user to find a collection. Specifically this property will support searches of the form: Which collections have Accrual Policy of "Closed"? Which Accrual Methods are in use for collections with Accrual Policy of "Active"? etc Perhaps more importantly, it allows a user to select from amongst a number of candidate collections, and/or to compare this attribute of collections that are otherwise similar. It also helps a user to interpret a collection that they have found or selected by some other criteria. |
| Working Group support |
See the mailing list archives of the WG, especially Jul 2004. |
| Proposed status | Conforming |
| Related DCMI terms |
[n/a] |
| Related non-DCMI terms |
(Proposed encoding scheme) (Proposed element) (Proposed element) The International Standard for Archival Description (ISAD(G)), Second Edition (2000) is a descriptive standard for archival records. It can be applied to units of description at any level from the collection (or fonds) to the individual item, and includes a related element:
ISAD(G) does not itself provide a machine-readable binding. The Encoded Archival Description (EAD) DTD is a standard for encoding archival finding aids using SGML or XML. It includes an XML element:
This is an XML element, not an RDF property. |
| Impact on applications |
If existing DC applications for collection-level description capture this data, they probably do so as part of the value of a The introduction of a distinct property allows the metadata creator to represent this information separately from the description of the scope and content of the collection. As the property is not proposed as a refinement of one of the 15 DC elements available in the "Simple DC" application profile, the information represented by this proposed property will be lost during "dumb-down" to "Simple DC". |
| About the proposers |
The term is proposed by the Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group. One of the primary aims of the WG is the development of a Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) for collection-level description, i.e. for the description of a collection as a resource, rather than the description of the individual items that make up that collection. Records of the activity of the WG are available in the mailing list archives. The current draft of the Collection Description Application Profile is available at |
