DUBLIN CORE - International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science

Ametadatainitiative intended to allow users of theworld wide webto search for electronic information resourcesand information about resources in other formats in a way analogous to using a library catalogue (see catalogues). It offers a resource discovery mechanism based on fifteen descriptive elements. These are:

. Title (the name given the resource).

. Creator (theauthoror institution responsible for creating thecontent).

. Subject (the topic of the resource).

. Description (text outlining or providing an abstractof the content).

. Publisher (those responsible for making the resource available).

. Contributors (those who supplied elements of the content).

. Date (when the resource was made available).

. Type (acategorizationof the content).

. Format (digital or physical manifestation of the content).

. Identifier (an unambiguous reference to the resource, e.g.uniform resource locatoror international standard book number).

. Source (an original resource from which the content is derived).

. Language.

. Relation (reference to any related resource).

. Coverage (extent or scope of the content).

. Rights (information on copyright status).

150 DUBLIN CORE

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative began in 1995, after a workshop in Dublin, Ohio, and continues as an open forum working to promote acceptance and use of metadata standards and practices generally, and the Dublin Core elements in particular. Its activities include working

groups, workshops, conferences, liaison on standards and educational efforts.

E

E-COMMERCE

At a basic level this refers to selling goods and services via the internet, using Web pages. In this sense there is little basic difference between e-commerce and catalogue sales or the use of television shopping channels, in that awareness of the product may be obtained at a distance, but delivery is likely to be via postal servicesand other means of delivery to the purchaser’s actual address. E-commerce is, however, distinct in that the methods for ordering (by electronic mail) and paying (byelectronic data interchange) are fully integrated with the means of advertis- ing. It can also involve the delivery of specifically electronic products. For instance, access to por- nographic images and text is the most traded category of e-commerce.

The concept of e-commerce is now subsumed within a broader concept of e-business in which the Internet, intranets and extranets are used to create and transform business relationships. E- business can not only increase the speed of service delivery, and reduce the cost of business operations, but also contribute to the improve- ment of the quality of goods and services through the effective transfer and sharing of information with customers, within organizations and between organizations.

E-GOVERNMENT

In broad terms, electronic or e-government can refer to the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in politics at the global, state, party or civil societal level. A narrower definition, dominant in most political systems, refers to the impact of the Internet and

related network technologies on the values, processes and outcomes of central and local government, and their administrative structures, with the objective of providing public access ‘to information about all the services offered by . . . Departments and their agencies; and enabling the public to conduct and conclude transactions for all those services’ (UK National Audit Office 2002: 1). Although the term is sometimes con- sidered to be synonymous with ‘e-democracy’, this is misleading. An analytical distinction should be drawn between the two on the grounds that, unlike e-democracy, the dominant model of e-government to date has not often involved the development of direct forms of political delibera- tion and decision-making through electronic re- ferendums and similar devices.

E-government emerged as an agenda for gen- eral reform of the public sectors of liberal democratic political systems during the early 1990s. The Clinton Presidency in the USA led the way with its ‘National Performance Review’

of the Federal bureaucracy (US National Perfor- mance Review 1993). It was the explosion of Internet use in the mid-1990s, however, which gave impetus to the idea, and countries such as the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand soon followed suit with their own versions. In the UK, the Labour Party, elected in 1997, put

‘electronic service delivery’ at the centre of its programme for ‘Modernising Government’ (UK Cabinet Office 1998), claiming that all public services would be online by 2005 – a target greeted with much scepticism by the IT industry and political commentators alike.

In common with other programmes of organizational reform, the claims made about e-govern-

ment differ quite substantially, but can be divided into two main schools.

According to one, far-reaching, perspective, the principal aim is to use ICTs, especially the Internet, to open up the state to citizen involvement. The ubiquity of network technologies offers the potential to increase political participa- tion and reshape the state into an open, interactive, network form, as an alternative to both traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations and more recent, market-like forms of service delivery based on the ‘contracting out’ of public-sector activities, often termed the ‘New Public Management’. Proponents of this perspective argue that widespread use of the Internet means that the traditional application of ICTs in public bureaucracies, based around inward- facing mainframe computer systems that origi- nated in the 1960s, should now be superseded by outward-facing networks in which the division between an organization’s internal information processing and its external users effectively becomes redundant. Government becomes a ‘learn- ing organization’, able to respond to the needs of its citizens, who are in turn able to influence public bureaucracies by rapid, aggregative feed- back mechanisms like e-mail and interactive websites.

A second, less radical, school of thought suggests that e-government does not necessarily require greater public involvement in shaping how services are delivered, but instead indirectly benefits citizens through the efficiency gains and cost savings produced by the reduction of internal organizational ‘friction’, chiefly via the auto- mation of routine tasks and disintermediation.

Networks are also at the core of this perspective, but it is the ability of the Internet and intranets to ‘join up’ and co-ordinate the activities of previously disparate government departments and services that is seen as its most attractive feature. In this view, citizens are perceived mainly as the ‘consumers’ of public services like health- care information, benefits payments, passport applications, tax returns and so on. This has been the dominant model in those countries that have taken the lead in introducing e-government reforms.

E-government is not without its critics. Some suggest that changes are limited to a ‘managerial’

agenda of service delivery more consistent with the New Public Management and that the oppor- tunities offered by the Internet for invigorating

democracy and citizenship might be missed (Chadwick and May 2003). Other criticisms are:

that the conservatism of existing administrative elites will scupper any prospects of decisive change; that issues of unequal access (both within and between states) to online services are being neglected; that large corporate IT interests are exercising an undue influence on the shape of e-government due to their expertise; that traditional face-to-face contacts with public services, especially those associated with welfare systems, cannot be satisfactorily replaced by web-based communication; that the cost savings promised by reforms have been slow to materialize; and that distintermediation of traditional representa- tive bodies (parliaments, local councils) may occur, to the detriment of democracy.

Whatever the claims made for e-government, perhaps its most significant feature from the perspective of the information sciences is that the Web browser and the Internet, with their associated standards, protocols and file formats, brought together under the umbrella of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), will form the foundation of public sector use of ICTs for the foreseeable future. The most popular ways of transferring data across the Internet – from secure transactions, to compressed graphics, vi- deo and sound – will be used by governments from now on. The days of large-scale, often Byzantine, tailor-made systems that rapidly date are perhaps coming to an end. Networks are easier to build and maintain than ever before, and it is much simpler for governments to inter- face their internal networks with the outside world.

References

Chadwick, A. and May, C. (2003) ‘Interaction between states and citizens in the age of the Internet: ‘‘e- government" in the United States, Britain and the European Union’,Governance16(2).

UK National Audit Office (2002)Better Public Services through E-Government, HC704–1, HMSO.

US National Performance Review (1993)Re-Engineer- ing through Information Technology: Accompanying Report of the National Performance Review, GPO.