Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile

The Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile (DC Collections AP) provides a standardized way to create collection-level descriptions of aggregations of physical or digital resources. Published in March 2007 by the Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group, it enables institutions to describe entire collections as units rather than individual items within them, supporting discovery, identification, and selection of collections across domains.

Background

Collection-level description has long been an important practice in libraries, archives, and museums, where the sheer volume of individual items makes item-level cataloguing impractical or where the collection itself has significance as an aggregation. The Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group recognized that existing metadata standards focused primarily on individual resources, leaving a gap for structured descriptions of collections. Drawing on Michael Heaney's "An Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues," the group developed a formal application profile that applies the Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) framework to collection-level metadata.

Purpose and Scope

The DC Collections AP specifies how to construct Dublin Core metadata description sets for:

• Collections -- aggregations of physical or digital resources of any type, including natural objects, created objects, born-digital items, and digital surrogates
• Catalogues or indices -- aggregations of metadata that describe collections

The profile is designed primarily to support discovery and selection of collections, though it may also serve collection management. It supports searching by name, subject, coverage, item type, format, creator, owner, and relationships between collections. It also enables identification of known collections through formal identifiers, titles, and descriptions.

Data Model

The profile defines a simple entity-relationship model with five entity types:

Key relationships include: items are gathered into collections, collections are located in locations, collections are accessed via services, and collections are described by catalogues or indices.

Vocabularies and Namespaces

The DC Collections AP draws terms from multiple vocabularies:

Key Properties for Collections

The profile specifies properties for describing collections including: Title, Alternative Title, Description (Abstract), Size (Extent), Language, Item Type, Item Format, Rights, Access Rights, Accrual Method, Accrual Periodicity, Accrual Policy, Custodial History (Provenance), Audience, Subject, Spatial and Temporal Coverage, Collector, Owner, and relationship properties for sub-collections, super-collections, catalogues, and associated collections.

Governance and Maintenance

The DC Collections AP was produced by the Dublin Core Collection Description Task Group under DCMI. The profile was published as a draft on 2007-03-09 and has not been formally updated since. It is independent of any specific serialization syntax and can be expressed using any binding compatible with the DCMI Abstract Model. DCMI publishes its specifications under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Notable Implementations

The DC Collections AP has been used in cross-institutional collection registries, aggregation portals, and digital library systems that need to describe collections as first-class entities. It has influenced collection-level metadata practice in cultural heritage institutions, particularly in the UK and Europe where collection-level description is integral to archival and museum practice.

Related Standards

• DCMI Metadata Terms -- the primary vocabulary source for collection properties
• Dublin Core Metadata Element Set -- foundation vocabulary from which core properties are drawn
• DCMI Abstract Model -- the formal model that defines how application profiles are structured

Further Reading

• DC Collections Application Profile
• DCMI Metadata Terms
• DCMI Type Vocabulary