Better, faster, stronger: building a better dublin core generator
Nick Steffel · 2011
A number of different free online tools exist for turning user input into formatted Dublin Core code. The author, as part of his MLIS degree, used these various tools to assist with his coursework. While they were all useful to some degree, a number of issues were identified which limited their overall utility. The actual code generated by these tools was often obsolete or inconsistent. Most existing tools are designed to generate Dublin Core in HTML format; some offered RDF-formatted XML, but no tool offered to generate Dublin Core in plain XML. The lack of XML support is especially unfortunate given that recent surveys such as Kidane's (2009) have shown that XML is by far the preferred format of libraries and archives using Dublin Core today. The formatting of the generated code was also an issue. Some tools automatically included additional code such as a root element or namespace references, however none provided the option to include or exclude these additional coding elements as desired.