Foreword

The New Zealand Government Locator Service (NZGLS) Metadata Element Set provides a set of metadata elements designed for describing resources, to improve:

• Discovery;
• Visibility;
• Accessibility; and
• Interoperability.

The set was developed by a working group at a series of meetings held during 1998-2001, and has since been refined.

The New Zealand public sector is required to adopt and use NZGLS. [Refer to Section A.2.2] The E-government Unit of the State Services Commission provides a tool called "Metalogue" to collect this metadata for use in government web portals. Discovery-level metadata, as established by NZGLS, also has other uses both within Government agencies and in aiding inter-operability between them.

This Usage Guide provides explanation and guidance to people creating NZGLS metadata to the specification defined in NZGLS Metadata Element Set version 2.1.

Relationship to Dublin Core

The NZGLS element set comprises 19 descriptors. These resulted from the working group meetings in 1998-2001.

NZGLS is based on:

• the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES). This consists of 15 descriptors documented on the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) website http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ and issued by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 15836 : 2003;
• the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative "Metadata Terms" which specifies all metadata terms maintained by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, including elements, element refinements, encoding schemes, and vocabulary terms (the DCMI Type Vocabulary), published at: http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/
• the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) Metadata Element Set. This is documented on the National Archives of Australia website http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/summary.html and issued as AS 5044-2002.

NZGLS extends the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. It contains 4 additional elements and a number of different qualifiers. These enable it to describe more categories of resources and allow richer description of resources. A small number of Dublin Core qualifiers are not used in NZGLS. Nonetheless, NZGLS is entirely compatible and interoperable with Dublin Core.

Contact Details

Contact the NZGLS Maintenance Agency to provide feedback at:

NZGLS Maintenance Agency

Archives New Zealand

P O Box 12 050

Wellington 6038

NEW ZEALAND

E-mail: mailto:nzgls@ssc.govt.nz

For thesaurus suggestions contact the Thesaurus Advisory Group (TAG) via:

E-mail: mailto:thesaurus@e-government.govt.nz