Archive for April 2010
Accessibility standards and Government 2.0 — adulterated?
The Commonwealth Government’s Govt 2 task force produced a report, called Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0 http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/gov20taskforcereport/index.html , which was published by the Chairman, Nicholas Gruen, on 22 December 2009.
The recommendations on Accessibility could be read IMHO to water down the normal mandatory requirements to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
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Not your granddad’s Dublin Core
I first remember hearing about Dublin Core (DC) at a one-day seminar for librarians on metadata at the State Library of NSW in 1997. In those days DC could be pretty much explained in twenty minutes or less. Sure, there was a session by Warwick Cathro titled Metadata: complexity or simplicity, but — to the cataloguers in the room at least — it all seemed pretty simple in comparison to traditional cataloguing. In fact, too simple. I remember several cataloguers grumbling at what they saw as the dumbing down of standards (not long after, Michael Gorman famously dismissed metadata as “cataloguing practiced by ill-informed men”).
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