NDSA:Digital Preservation Metadata Action Team -- March 15, 2011

Meeting of the NDSA Standards Action Team on Digital Preservation Metadata -- March 15, 2011

Present: Amy Rudersdorf, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources; Jennifer Waxman, New York University; Mary Vardigan, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

Agenda

I. Review the spreadsheet tool with an example from our area

II. Develop a list of candidate standards to describe

III. Discuss scope of the effort

The group used PREMIS as an example and walked through the fields of the spreadsheet with these findings:

• Institutional Use and User Group – We weren’t sure how to deal with these fields. For our example of PREMIS, it turns out that there is an Implementors’ Registry, so we opted to include the link to this for Institutional Use. Similarly, for User Group, we included the link to the PREMIS Implementors Group.

• Supersedes – We weren’t sure whether we should include all previous versions but ended up doing so with dates.

• Category definitions – We weren’t sure if “Standard” means a specification that has achieved something like ISO status, but we made that assumption. It may be helpful to define the three types. We ended up using “Best Practice” for PREMIS.

• Data Dictionary – We didn’t know how to use this field and weren’t sure if it pertains to the profile content or to the spreadsheet fields themselves (we thought the latter).

• More generally, we wondered if there will be written documentation for using the spreadsheet.

We discussed adding the following preservation metadata standards:

PB Core – Public Broadcasting Core Metadata Dictionary -- http://www.pbcore.org/

MIX – NISO Metadata for Images in XML Schema -- http://www.loc.gov/standards/mix/

MPEG 7 – MPEG Multimedia Content Description Interface -- http://mpeg.chiariglione.org/standards/mpeg-7/mpeg-7.htm

TextMD – Technical Metadata for Text – http://www.loc.gov/standards/textMD/

ALTO – Technical Metadata for Optical Character Recognition -- http://www.loc.gov/standards/alto/about.php

OPM – Open Provenance Model -- http://openprovenance.org/

ODRL – Open Digital Rights Language -- http://odrl.net/

PMDO – Preservation Metadata for Digital Objects -- http://www.ncecho.org/dig/pmdo.shtml

AES Core Audio – Descriptive Metadata for Audio Objects -- http://www.aes.org/standards/

AES Process History – Administrative Metadata for Audio Objects -- http://www.aes.org/standards/

ADL – AES Standard for Network and File Transfer of Audio -- http://www.aes.org/standards/

METS – Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard -- http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/

METSRights – METS Rights Declaration Extension Schema -- http://cosimo.stanford.edu/sdr/metsrights.xsd

VRACore -- Visual Resources Association Core -- http://www.vraweb.org/projects/vracore4/

It is difficult to draw the line between metadata intended purely for preservation and some of the descriptive metadata standards with elements important to preservation. Our group would like to come up with some parameters to make these distinctions. We weren’t sure if we would be reinventing the wheel by describing widely known and used standards like METS or Dublin Core or descriptive standards that are domain-specific. Other such standards we thought about in this space included EAD, TEI, XML, GML, etc.

Regarding the scope of the task, we also had questions about tools like JHOVE and other format-related resources, DROID and other metadata extractor tools, Baggit, Universal Numeric Fingerprint (UNF), etc. We weren’t sure whether another group was going to catalog relevant tools.

Post-Meeting Notes

In the course of our NSDA work and other activities, we came across these lists of existing preservation-related standards (this is not exhaustive):

• DCC DIFFUSE Standards: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/standards/diffuse/standards?sort=lifecycle

• Archives and Records Association, UK and Ireland, Guide to Standards: http://www.archives.org.uk/si-dsg/guide-to-standards.html

• Jenn Riley’s Work on Metadata Standards:

o Glossary: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/seeingstandards_glossary_pamphlet.pdf

o In poster form: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/seeingstandards_glossary_poster.pdf

o Visualization: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/~jenlrile/metadatamap/seeingstandards.pdf

• Metamap: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/turner/meta/english/index.html

• Standards of the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/standards/

• Wikipedia Metadata Standards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata_standards

• OCLC Metadata Standards PowerPoint (contains MetaMap above): http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=9&ved=0CHAQFjAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oclc.org%2Fresearch%2Fpresentations%2Fchildress%2Ffedlink_20031118.ppt&rct=j&q=metadata%20standards%20&ei=3T2TTavFO9DpgQfZmpEZ&usg=AFQjCNHqB7lyAd0p3HsOGcFbCIDQQjw0Zg&sig2=3ZIn-qm8S6xrQuberfR62Q&cad=rja

• PADI – Preserving Access to Digital Information -- http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/

We discovered that many of these resources are no longer being maintained. This raises some questions:

• How much are we reinventing the wheel by describing the resources in these lists?

• Could our role be to maintain a list that is actively curated over time?

• Should we include a superset of these resources related to digital preservation to ensure that our list is comprehensive?

• Where do we draw the line since many metadata standards are related in some way to preservation?