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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, monographs 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
is a document that has useful embedded metadata which librarians, digital asset managers and individuals can exploit to 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 prefer to keep the metadata of all their documents in separate catalogues or data bases for reasons of integrity and maintainability, but since one does not exclude the other, embedding the same metadata or a selection thereof 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. Notation in attribute/literal pairs is probably adequate for most private or local repositories.
The Dublin Core * set of standard meta terms or a basic subset thereof in combination with appropriate software is probably the best option to ensure that meta data 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.
* http://dublincore.org/workshops/ popularized the idea of “core meta data” 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 meta data 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.
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