Purpose – Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) is a standard metadata schema for describing electronic records, documents and web resources. Librarians have been influenced on its initial structure most efficiently. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the librarians' tendency and amount of their attention to this standard in national libraries of the world. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reports an empirical study of how 70 National Library web sites (NLWs) from 62 countries use DCMES. The source of each library web site main page is viewed and the data gathered with a formed checklist. The paper is conducted to determine whether or not DCMES is used within NLWs. In this paper DCMES is divided into three: content description; intellectual property and rights; and structural manifestation. The tendency measurement of NLWs' designers to each purpose is the second objective of this paper. Findings – According to the results, 14 of all the NLWs use DCMES (20 percent). These 14 NLWs tendency ratio to each of the purposes are: content description 49 percent; intellectual properties and rights 57 percent; and structural manifestation 70 percent. The least‐used Dublin Core (DC) elements are source, relation and contributor – being used only once, and the most‐used DC element is title – used in 13 NLWs. The National Library of Serbia uses the most DC elements, using all 15, and the Bibliothèque Nationale Suisse uses the least DC elements by using two. Originality/value – The results presented in this paper show that most of the national libraries, the main libraries of the world, do not pay much attention to DCMES in web pages' designation. On the other hand, some other nation libraries using DCMES do not consider the main purpose of DCMES – content description – to be more important than its other purposes. Ultimately, the paper presents five probable reasons why most NLWs do not use DCMES

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