Continuing to learn about and use Dublin Core, in this project I got more practice collecting this information and filing it into the correct Dublin Core fields. I chose six items all relating to the crusades and relations between East and West. Five are books, and one a journal article. 

There are certainly limitations to using only these fields. Not all relevant data can be fit into these fields. For instance, even to properly format a citation from one of these items, one needs more information, such as place of publication. For journal articles it is even worse, with no clear place to put the name of the journal. In this example, I first put this information under source, but then thought this would be problematic if I were to decide to use source to track other information, such as who digitized the older books that weren’t born-digital. For this reason I thought again and put the name of the journal under publisher, though that can obscure who published the journal. 

Another difficulty is that with only a creator field, it is difficult to distinguish between authors, translators, and editors. Using only standard Dublin Core fields also introduces other ambiguities, as it disguises the categorical differences between articles and monographs for example, both having the identifier of “text.” With nearly everything being “text,” this becomes a less than helpful designation. Even in the format description this distinction cannot be discerned, as I opted to not enter the dimensions, weight, etc. of the physical book, but the electronic version I am actually accessing, whether it is a pdf or an epub – all these items happen to be in PDF format. Coverage was a difficult field, as this is not always clearly included in descriptions and subject keywords. Sometimes it can only be determined by actually looking through the book and its contents.