Comparison of Used Metadata Elements in Digital Libraries in IRAN with Dublin Core Standard

Introduction: Internet and Wide World Web development, as well as the increasing content of electronic information resources in the web environment has created many challenges front of organizers and managers of information. One of the fundamental challenges is how to manage electronic resources to increase their accessibilities, to increase recall and precision. A new way that in recent years has been created for encounter with this problem is metadata. The most important environments that can use from metadata are digital libraries (DLs). Because of rapid development of DLs in Iran and organization and management importance of resources in these libraries, in this research has been paid to investigation of usage of metadata elements in DLs in Iran and their adaptation rate with Dublin Core standard. Method: This research is survival descriptive research. First used metadata elements has been determinate in DLs in Iran and then has been paid to adaptation rate of used metadata elements in eight DLs in Iran with Dublin Core standard using of a check list. Findings: Findings of research showed none of DLs in Iran have not used from special metadata schema like Dublin Core and etc. But this research showed 100 percent of libraries have used from general metadata elements (HTML metatags). “Omid-e Iran “DL using 7 elements is in first rank and “DID” DL using 1 element is in last rank. Result: Findings denote used metadata elements are limited to html metatags that in between these elements a few number are adaptation with Dublin Core elements. We hope managers and designers of DLs study researches and step impressively for more standardization of DLs in Iran.

Digital libraries, Metadata, Metatags, Dublin Core, Iran