I just finished installing COinS metadata into parts of Open Context. COinS is a lightweight, relatively easy to implement standard for expressing Dublin Core metadata (or “information about information”, as in a library catalog). Dublin Core is a very widely used set of metadata. It’s found in RSS feeds and it is the standard used by the pioneering Archaeology Data Service (UK).

Much discussion about metadata centers on interoperability of services and making information easier to find. To these ends, we’re also working on making Open Context compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocols for Metadata Harvesting.

Besides being important for back-end interoperability, there are also much more user-center applications of metadata. RSS really popularized Dublin Core. It made it much more than a librarian issue, and turned virtually everyone with a weblog into a Dublin Core metadata author.

Zotero, a break-through project out of George Mason University, promises to make digital metadata much more a part of the daily lives of scholars. Zotero is a free, open source, citation tool that plugs into the Firefox browser. It scans every webpage you view, ranging from weblog posts to articles in JSTOR, and looks for metadata. It uses this metadata to automatically capture bibliographic reference information. That saves researchers a great deal of tedium and reduces annoying typographic errors in building up their reference databases.

COinS is one of the standards for expressing Dublin Core supported by Zotero, and that’s why we use it in Open Context. And we’re not the only ones to realize the significance of Zotero’s automatic bibliographic tools. The Pleiades Project (an NEH funded open access initiative developing scholarly resources and community around ancient geography) is also compliant with Zotero.

These types of tools will do much to bootstrap digital dissemination of research. Easy capture of bibliographic information makes Web resources very convenient. It’s also amazing how some of the simple features (COinS is very easy to implement) make such a difference in easy of use and relevance for scholarship.

It is very exciting to see these developments come together!