I received an email from Dan Brickley this morning announcing the sad news of the death of Michael Sperberg McQueen.

I was not a close friend of Michael's, but as erstwhile Dublin Core helmsman, I knew that he was one of those brilliant thinkers who had graced our community with his talents, and through the alchemy of abstraction, elevated our too-pragmatic collection of rules and examples to a more coherent system that might stand up to the assault of a complex and evolving digital world. For the metadata geeks among you, see for example: https://www.dublincore.org/.../dublin-core/info-factoring/

Markup is the bedrock of our digital existence, one of two seminal ideas that enabled the Web (the other, or course, being hyperlinks). The early interest of people like the late Yuri Rubinski, and Michael made our community immeasurably more robust, and generations of users who will never know their names will benefit from their efforts long after we're all digital dust.

If I may quote Dan's words:
"The trouble with working in a massively distributed team is that we don't get to say goodbyes properly when we leave." Ain't it the truth.
Godspeed, Michael, and thank you.

Stuart Weibel
OCLC Research (retired)
onetime metadata maven and co-founder of the Dublin Core Initiative