discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Karen Coyle <kcoyle AT kcoyle.net>]

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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