Google and Dublin Core

I was scanning through the Google doc to try to solidify my response to this week's discussion. Was more than slightly amazed to find that they consider Dublin Core metadata to be mere "spam". This has all kinds of implications for digital image collections, as it is the standard format for the cataloging of these items.

For example, our collections are in CONTENTdm, which uses DC as the basis of its metadata template. OCLC, the group that DiMema, the makers of dm markets its products through, has promised that if one opens one's collections for harvest, they will be processed into OAI, and will show up in the search engines, including Google. Does this mean that Google will ignore them? Does it mean that it will show the collection as a whole, but include none of the ctaloging that makes the collection usable? Our own collections don't have a start page, linking directly to the database, so the search engine can't hook on to that.

This adds a whole new set of questions to the field of digitization, and ones that we will have to answer soon. It's starting to feel like the old days, the late 1990s-early 2000s when there were no standards and everybody was just tossing things up and hoping that patrons would find them. I didn't like it then, and I like it even less now.