Introduction: Recent progress in providing innovative solutions in the organization of electronic
resources and research in this area shows a global trend in the use of new strategies such
as metadata to facilitate description, place for, organization and retrieval of resources in the
web environment. In this context, library metadata standards have a special place; therefore,
the purpose of the present study has been a comparative study on the Central Libraries’
Websites of Iran State Universities for Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML) and Dublin
Core metadata elements usage in 2011. Materials and Methods: The method of this study
is applied-descriptive and data collection tool is the check lists created by the researchers.
Statistical community includes 98 websites of the Iranian State Universities of the Ministry of
Health and Medical Education and Ministry of Science, Research and Technology and method
of sampling is the census. Information was collected through observation and direct visits to
websites and data analysis was prepared by Microsoft Excel software, 2011. Results: The
results of this study indicate that none of the websites use Dublin Core (DC) metadata and
that only a few of them have used overlaps elements between HTML meta tags and Dublin
Core (DC) elements. The percentage of overlaps of DC elements centralization in the Ministry of
Health were 56% for both description and keywords and, in the Ministry of Science, were 45%
for the keywords and 39% for the description. But, HTML meta tags have moderate presence
in both Ministries, as the most-used elements were keywords and description (56%) and the
least-used elements were date and formatter (0%). Conclusion: It was observed that the
Ministry of Health and Ministry of Science follows the same path for using Dublin Core standard
on their websites in the future. Because Central Library Websites are an example of scientific
web pages, special attention in designing them can help the researchers to achieve faster
and more accurate information resources. Therefore, the influence of librarians’ ideas on the
awareness of web designers and developers
will be important for using metadata elements
as general, and specifically for applying such
standards.