The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), an organization leading the development of international standards to improve electronic resource management and information discovery, announced the formal recommendation of the Dublin Core (DC) Qualifiers. The addition of the DC Qualifiers enhances the semantic precision of the existing DC Metadata Element Set. The DC Qualifiers build upon the DC Metadata Element Set, which provides 15 categories to describe resources on the Web – a catalog card with new dimensions. Known as the Dublin Core, the metadata model has become the de facto standard for description of information on the Internet. For the past year, working groups of the Dublin Core developed these newly agreed upon refinements to the catalog card to give better access to information we seek. In essence, the new recommendations for Dublin Core Qualifiers increase the effectiveness of metadata by giving it finer granularity. For example, a publication’s date, which would be the Dublin Core Metadata Element, may be further detailed as a particular type of date by using a Dublin Core Qualifier such as date last modified, date created, or date issued. The DC Qualifiers improve interpretation of metadata values and can be easily recorded or transferred into HTML, XML, RDF or relational databases. The evolution of DC Qualifiers draws from the input of many individuals across a broad array of disciplines. Users include museum informatics specialists, archivists, digital library researchers, libraries, and government information providers and a variety of content providers. Their efforts have led standards organizations, such as NISO (National Information Standards Organization) in the U.S. and CEN in Europe (European Committee for Standardization) to view the DC Metadata Element Set as a benchmark candidate for simple resource description on the Internet. More recently, new sectors, such as education and industry, have been attracted to Dublin Core’s simplicity, multilingual scope, consensus philosophy and widespread adoption. http://purl.org/dc/documents/dcmes-qualifiers, http://purl.org/dc/