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Roles and Responsibilities

Central Support

The designated lead agency fulfills the following roles;

• maintaining and developing the IPSMS
• promoting the use of the standard
• maintaining and developing the user guidelines
• maintaining the IPSMS website
• providing advice and support on implementation of the IPSMS
• monitoring compliance
• liasing with the international Dublin Core metadata community
• reviewing the standard in consultation with the user community

Local Role

Organisations applying the standard have the following roles and responsibilities;

• creation and maintenance of metadata in conformance with the IPSMS
• ensuring systems are in place to facilitate the process
• self-monitoring for compliance with the IPSMS
• contributing to the ongoing development of the standard

Who in the organisation will create and maintain the metadata?

It is recommended that metadata be created as early in the life of the resource as possible, as those responsible for the information content are likely to be most familiar with that content, and consequently best placed to assign the information which goes to make up a metadata record.

If the person(s) responsible for creating and maintaining metadata is/are not responsible for the actual content of the resource, then a process needs to be in place whereby they are notified of changes to the resource. Metadata should be reviewed every time a resource is changed.

Where web publishing is a distributed process, certain metadata elements may be more suitably added at different phases in that process. This may facilitate the inclusion of those who are trained in the area of information management, including librarians.

Consequently, organisations may want to ensure that included in the publishing process are people with the necessary skills, including those who are trained in the area of information management.