In the interests of community, transparency and sustainability, the PBCore team has decided to make the PBCore 2.0 respository on GitHub a public repository.

It is a bit unusual to approach a metadata standard like it were an open source application, but we found GitHub to be helpful in our process for developing PBCore 2.0 and we think it could be even more helpful in sustaining the effort going forward.

What can you do with PBCore 2.0 on GitHub?

You can download the XSD schema

Although, you should actually use the official version from this site.

You can submit issues that you have with PBCore 2.0.

As part of the process for developing PBCore 2.0 we solicited Changes Requests from the community of users. Many of these request have been lingering for years, but this was the first time anyone had made an effort to collect them in one place. And ongoing change requests can be gathered here to inform future versions of PBCore.

Of course, you can still use the comment function of this web site to submit requests, but if you prefer a more formal “issue” format, use the Issue tracker at GitHub

You can branch PBCore2.0 and submit patches to it.

If there’s something in the XSD (or in the support documents in the repository) that you think should be changed, please go ahead and change and push your changes back to us. When the next version of PBCore is released, we’ll evaluate any and all patches that are submitted

And for those of you interested in history, you can see some of the iterations that PBCore went through as it progressed from 1.3 to 2.0

It ain’t pretty and mistakes were made. But if you really want to know why we made the decisions we made, it’s (mostly) all there in the repository.

We are pretty excited about this latest use of social technology to support PBCore, and we hope it will contribute to the robustness and sustainability of the standard. If you have any thoughts on this development — good idea, bad idea, other ideas — please share them in the comments below.