Some of the things I was asked to look into last time:
1. Character limits in the Dspace archive: There appear to be none anywhere. I tried loading an item with a page worth of text from wikipedia entered for every free-text field...and it took the information and displayed it. However, there still may be character limits in the external services that might harvest our data, so it would still be wise to keep them reasonably short.
2. Copyright: I called Sally Waint, who is our resident copyright expert. She said we are good to go.
3. Coverage/inclusive dates fields: These fields are free-text fields, just like most of the other fields. It seems we can put in dates in any format we like: "7/10/06" or "last tuesday." I don't see anything in the dublin core standard about how dates should be entered, but I will keep looking.