In March of 1995, a group of 52 professionals in fields ranging from librarianship to computer science to text encoding met in Dublin, Ohio to discuss the development of a standard that could be used for the description of documents (e.g. personal Web pages, Web journals, FTP sites, etc.) encountered in a networked electronic environment. Sponsored by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a set of thirteen metadata elements were chosen which have been redefined and clarified into fifteen elements now known as the Dublin Core (DC).
The following guide is designed to explain each of the elements individually and show examples of how they can be used for the description of electronic documents. The outline below is provided with links to each individual DC element. The entire contents of this guide can be obtained from the Dublin Core Elements site. As additional aids, a list of Acronyms related to Dublin Core has also been provided, along with a glossary and bibliography.