Archives and preservation metadata: state of the art and a methodological proposal

Abstract

A substantial part of the effort developed in order to defi ne sets of archival metadata focuses on descriptive metadata; however, other types of metadata exist, needed in order to manage data in a digital environment. One of them is preservation metadata, studied throughout different projects. First, this paper suggests well-accepted definitions for preservation metadata. Secondly, it reviews some existing projects, and from them suggests a proposal for implementation in an archival environment. In order to reach this aim, it investigates a broadly accepted reference model —OAIS (Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System)— as well as fi ve experiences: the National Library of Australia (NLA) Preservation Metadata for Digital Collections project, Networked European Deposit Library (NEDLIB), the CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives (CEDARS) project, the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and Research Libraries Group (RLG) joint project PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies), and the New Zealand National Library Metadata Standards Framework-Preservation Metadata project. The initial effort described and qualitatively evaluated these projects, on the basis of the following criteria: modularity, extensibility, refi nement, multilinguism, interoperability and reuse, as well as on the existence of both a formal and a formalized grammar. Data elements were tabulated in order to make comparison easier. The result was a set of pre-existing metadata elements, as well as examples and a discussion about its feasibility in two environments: relational databases and markup languages. For the fi rst environment, a defi nition of fi elds and possibilities for its use were suggested. In the second one, an XML document was proposed, capable of being used as the basis for the creation of preservation metadata for digital archives. This document was used to automatically generate several grammars (schema and DTD). Possibilities of merging the features of these environments were taken into consideration. Finally, on the basis of the available software, some options to make feasible the use of preservation metadata were proposed