What in the world are “Dubin Core files”?

I’m teaching an online XML class to library school graduate students. The previous instructors of the class have asked the students to create “Dubin Core files” used to describe the content of things like TEI files. For the life of me, I can not figure out what a Dublin Core file is. To my mind, Dubin Core is all about a set of 15 (or so) names/labels used to more or less describe stuff. But people speak as if there is a such a thing as a Dublin Core (XML) file.

Do Dublin Core files exist, and if so, then can somebody show me one? Put another way, can you point me to a DTD or schema denoting Dublin Core XML? The closest I can come is the standard/default oai_dc description of an OAI-PMH item.

P.S. Showing me how to incorporate Dublin Core into HTML doesn’t count. Such are not Dublin Core files as much as they are HTML files.

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Eric Lease Morgan
Artist- and Librarian-At-Large