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Subject: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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  • From: Karen Coyle <kcoyle AT kcoyle.net>
  • To: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work <cc-metadata AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: resource is an academic paper
  • Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2005 17:41:30 -0700

Well, I guess I'll de-lurk on this one ;-) Having been through numerous discussions as to what makes a publication "academic" and what that might mean, I think the discussants are generally too narrow in their views. There are academic publications, to be sure, and by that we generally mean peer-reviewed or published by an academic press, but there's not a true one-to-one between the authors and producers of these publications and their actual audience. (read: the academic world is not really in the ivory tower that it thinks its in.) There are academic activities that make use of "popular" information, and there are non-academics who read and benefit from academic publications. So I don't think that you can easily say that you have written only "for academics" although you may be publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. The distinctions that make sense to me are "type" as a description of the publication, and "audience" as a description of the "reading/knowledge level" required. However, "type" is a morass -- every citation database I worked with had a different set of types, often as many as a dozen or more, and none were universal. In general, types varied by the discipline, with sciences having distinctly different types from the humanities. That said, I will risk all by suggesting that the following may be what the academic folks are intending:

type = scholarly publication (which means peer-reviewed, may or may not be non-profit, and generally follows guidelines set up by the publication relating to citations, etc.)
type = research article (which means that it is generally based on "science" and reveals the results of what most would consider to be a research methodology)

audience = graduate/research (audience is generally a "level" concept -- from early grades through research)

kc

Mike Linksvayer wrote:

Evan Prodromou wrote:

What about using the DCMI Audience element? Type=Text, Audience=Academic would indicate that this is a text work primarily for academics.


That seems reasonable.

Other possibilities:

* dc:type (wouldn't conflict with present use, value would just be from a different vocabulary)

* dc:subject

* dcterms:educationLevel (probably not)

For any of the above, can anyone recommend a vocabulary to use that includes something like "Academic" (for audience) or "Scholarly Publication" for the others?

PRISM defines a list of
http://prismstandard.org/vocabularies/1.2/resourcetype.xml which includes "article", intended to be used with dc:type, but that could be any sort of article. It also includes "journal" but that isn't quite right.

PRISM also defines http://prismstandard.org/vocabularies/1.2/category.xml (intellectual genre) which they recommend for prism:category but we could use with dc:subject or dc:type I suppose, but that list doesn't contain anything like "scholarly article".


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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle AT kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
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