Plea for the well-behaved document

A well-behaved document is an electronic document that is both user friendly and library friendly.

User friendly means a document is easy to read and easy to navigate on any reading device and for which reading software is readily available. It is in an open format and does not depend on proprietary (paid) software for display, styles and multimedia content. It must be searchable, has bookmarks (in applications that allow for it, such as PDF files in Acrobat or Adobe Reader), an interactive table of contents, i.e. one with 'clickable' links to the correct target page, and possibly an interactive index, cross references and links to external resources. Except for copyrighted material it should not be password protected or encrypted but must allow the user to print it out and to copy/paste portions of the text and possibly to add bookmarks and comments of his own.

This applies not only to scientific papers and manuals but to all documents that one would consult or refer to rather than read in a continuous stream from cover to cover, like novels or literary works.

Library friendly means a document has useful embedded metadata which librarians can exploit to automatically classify a document with little or no manual intervention, that is searchable and which can easily be indexed for full-text searching across a collection of documents.

University and public libraries tend to maintain metadata in separate data bases or containers, but since one does not exclude the other, embedding the same metadata also directly into a digital resource, automatically makes this data available to third parties who download or otherwise obtain access to such resources which they may want to preserve locally in their own knowledge base and/or to consult offline.

The Dublin Core * set of standard meta terms in combination with appropriate software is probably the best option to ensure that metadata is applied in a consistent manner and therefore has a better chance to be useful to librarians, content managers and individual users worldwide. They are already in use in many university and national libraries and they support refinements and namespaces (vocabularies) that can be adapted to the needs of organizations and user groups.

Well-behaved documents can save substantial amounts of time and money if planned and implemented accordingly from the beginning and they have a better chance of being found (in search engines), consulted and referenced on a regular basis.
The initiative in favour of the well-behaved document aims at elevating the well- behaved document to a standard and a quality symbol which is recognized and accepted worldwide by librarians and information workers. Sharing of knowledge (education) and accessibility of suitable tools shall be the means to achieve this goal.
Education is about raising awareness of necessity and advantages among all players in the publication process. It starts with the author or the party ordering the work and the publisher who should already plan their work from the very beginning for user friendliness and library acceptability.

Coaching and workshops (see Training) are best suited for imparting the required knowledge and there are already several software tools available on the market for embedding metadata in Dublin Core standard terms in electronic documents.

One such tool is digi-libris, designed for institutional asset managers, small or private libraries and content originators, helps maintaining library records and managing mixed collections(data bases) of physical and electronic objects. One can also read and embed metadata in DCMI interoperable online metadata standard in electronic documents in PDF, EPUB and HTML format and add bookmarks and interactive indices to render existing or third party PDF files more user friendly. For additional information click here.

* Dublin Core workshops popularized the idea of "core metadata" for simple and generic resource descriptions. The fifteen-element "Dublin Core" achieved wide dissemination as part of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It is also the default format used by Adobe® Acrobat® in the display of PDF files.
Starting in 2000, the Dublin Core community focused on "application profiles" -- the idea that metadata records would use Dublin Core together with other specialized vocabularies to meet particular implementation requirements.
For more information please see the Metadata Training Resources page.