What is the “Dumb-Down” Principle?
The so called “Dumb-Down Principle” simply means that in any use of a qualified DC element, the qualifier may be dropped and the remaining value of the element should still be a term that is useful for discovery. For example, there are several date qualifiers that might be used to enhance the precision of various dates associated with a resource. Dropping the date qualifier (say, for example, Date-Created) will still leave a useful date for discovery, though perhaps not quite as useful as if the qualifier were included. Similarly, the specification of a subject term from LCSH, for example, is still useful even if one does not know it was selected from a controlled vocabulary. The basic idea is that qualifiers should improve the precision of a piece of metadata, but the metadata should still be useful even without that extra precision (that is, dropping the qualifier has ‘dumbed-down’ the metadata).
