Using the Dublin Core to document digital art: A case study

The @art gallery is a digital art gallery affiliated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Art and Design. The exhibits in the gallery consist entirely of digital art often created exclusively for the Web environment. The authors, as part of a project conducted for the Digital Imaging and Media Technology Initiative at the University of Illinois, used the gallery for a case study to test the applicability of the Dublin Core metadata format for digital art. In addition, they used the Arts and Humanities Data Service's Discovering Online Resources Across the Humanities as a guide to best practice. Several challenges were presented by this study, including how best to extend Dublin Core to accommodate the multiple access points necessary to discover a work of digital art, how best to encode the FORMAT element to effectively describe the tools needed to view works of digital art, and whether their use of Dublin Core would translate into a record in CORC. The study indicates that Dublin Core elements must be qualified and repeated to clearly document the particular and unique characteristics of digital art and that the Dublin Core implementation in CORC does not always accommodate this use of Dublin Core.