Standardisation of Dublin Core in Europe

Dublin Core is developed in an open consensus building environment and has also succeeded in many countries and in many domains. The idea of Dublin Co re was to establish a de facto standard for metadata for discovery. There i s a natural development from de facto standards to formal standards. A very important detail of formal standardisation is the stability and the credib ility of an official standard. That was the background for the metadata pol icy of The Danish National Library Authority, agreed upon in December 1997. We decided to work for a formal standardisation of Dublin Core. There was - and is - a need for a standardised method of describing Internet resource s. And at that time Dublin Core seemed to be the best bid for a metadata sc hema. It was not very widely used in practice, but Dublin Core was what peo ple were talking about.