Library and Information Science students and DCMI Metadata Terms: do they understand the resource?

Abstract

The DCMI Metadata Terms website is a basic resource for all those who implement or want to implement Dublin Core in their metadata projects, but also for all those students of Library and Information Science (or related degrees) who are starting in the complex world of information representation. The aim of this paper is to analyze the students' perception of the DCMI Metadata Terms webpage and of the metadata schema itself. This is done through a mainly quantitative survey to the students of the subjects Information Representation: Metadata and Digital Libraries and Repositories of the University Degree in Information Management and Digital Documentation of the University of Barcelona. The results show a moderately positive perception of the website and additional tools such as the Dublin Core User Guide. They also indicate that students have problems understanding the practical application of several terms from the metadata scheme itself (coverage, relation, and contributor, especially). The conclusions offer some recommendations to overcome the difficulties identified by the students, such as improving the clarity in the writing of some sections, the connection between the website and the Dublin Core User Guide and the presence of multilingual pages.