e-learning standards

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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The metadata planets seemed to have aligned in recent months and there has been standards activity on several fronts. Sarah Currier’s paper from a couple of years back, Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008, gives a good background to the current environment.
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