I took our prototype metadata framework and tried using it to load a sample item into the database yesterday. There were a couple of problems:
* While the "date.created" field does exist, the only way to load any information into this field is to go in as an admin AFTER the entire submission process is over and put in in manually. Worse than this, you can't search on this field. At all. The only date Dspace seems to care about is the date the item was loaded into the system.
* Likewise, the "publisher" field has to be filled out manually after the entire submission process is over, and this also cannot be searched on.
* The "type" field, which we had wanted to be able to set as "letter" has only fixed choices, and "letter" is not one of them. I was able to manually edit this field, but only after the entire submission process is done.