CEDARS Access Issues Working Group


Metadata for Preservation

CEDARS Project Document AIW01

Michael Day
UKOLN: The UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
m.day@ukoln.ac.uk
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/


StatusCurrent
Last update3 August 1998
Created3 August 1998
AvailabilityWorkgroup

Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Background
3. Standards, formats and initiatives
3.1 Digital Rosetta Stone
3.2 Dublin Core
3.3 National Library of Australia PANDORA Logical Data Model
3.4 Open Archival Information System (OAIS)
3.5 Pittsburgh Project: Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping
3.6 Research Libraries Group (RLG) Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata
3.7 EBU-SMPTE Task Force on Harmonised Standards for the Exchange of Television Programme Material as Bit Streams
3.8 UBC Project: The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records
3.9 Universal Preservation Format
4. Conclusions and recommendations
5. References
6. Glossary
7. Acknowledgements


1. Introduction

This report is a review of metadata formats and initiatives in the specific area of digital preservation. It supplements the DESIRE Review of metadata (Dempsey et al. 1997). It is based on a literature review and information picked-up at a number of workshops and meetings and is an attempt to briefly describe the state of the art in the area of metadata for digital preservation.


2. Background: metadata and digital preservation

Discussions of metadata in the library community have largely centred on issues of resource description and discovery (Heery 1996; Heery, Powell and Day 1997; Dempsey and Heery 1998). There is, however, a growing awareness that metadata has an important role in digital resource management, including preservation. The CEDARS project recognised from an early stage that metadata issues would be important. A Working Group on Access Issues has been formed to investigate and recommend on metadata issues.

In a separate initiative in May 1997, the Research Libraries Group constituted a Working Group on the Preservation Issues of Metadata. The aim of this working group is to ensure that information essential to the continued use of digital resources is captured and preserved in an accessible form. A report has been produced which identifies 16 preservation metadata elements and provides a semantic framework for this (RLG Working Group on the Preservation Issues of Metadata 1998).

The following issues are relevant to the question of metadata:

2.1 Technical processes: emulation and migration

The core technical problems of digital preservation relate to inadequate media longevity, rapid hardware obsolescence and dependencies on particular software products. In this context it makes good sense to preserve the digital data itself (the bit-streams), not the physical medium on which it happens to reside.

Seamus Ross (1997, p. 331) comments that there are three main technical preservation options:

The first of these is not very practical and potentially expensive. For these reasons, Jeff Rothenberg (1995) has suggested the building of software emulators that would mimic the behaviour of obsolete hardware and software. This would involve encapsulating data together with the application software used to create it and a description of the required hardware environment (metadata). To facilitate future use, Rothenberg suggests attaching additional 'annotation metadata' to the surface of each encapsulation which would both "explain how to decode the obsolete records contained inside the encapsulation and to provide whatever contextual information is desired about these records" (Rothenberg 1996). This surface metadata, which could also contain resource discovery information, would be kept in a standard 'bootstrap' format so that it could be converted to new formats as part of the preservation refresh cycle.

The periodic migration of digital information from one generation of computer technology to a subsequent one is one of the solutions to the digital preservation problem proposed by Task Force on the Archiving of Digital Information (1996). With data migration, it is important to ensure that preserved documents are what the US National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) funded University of Pittsburgh Electronic Records Project describe (in an archives context) as 'inviolate', 'coherent' and 'auditable' (Duff 1996). David Bearman (1994, p. 302) says that if records are migrated to new software environments, "content, structure and context information must be linked to software functionality that preserves their executable connections" or that "representations of their relations must enable humans to reconstruct the relations that pertained in the original software environment". Successful migration strategies will, therefore, depend upon metadata being created to record the migration history of a digital object and to record contextual information so that a future user can reconstruct (or understand) the technological environment in which a particular digital object was created.

2.2 Authentication

In addition to the technical problems of digital preservation, there will be a need to address problems of intellectual preservation (Graham 1994a; 1994b). For example, how will users know that the digital object that they retrieve is the one that they want? Again, how can one guard against unauthorised changes being made to the information content of digital objects?

A partial solution to this problem would be the general adoption of unique and persistent digital identifiers. This would mean the assignment of a new identifier each time a particular digital object is updated. Current initiatives include the Uniform Resource Name (URN) which is being developed for the Internet community by working groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force (Sollins and Masinter 1994) and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), an initiative of the Association of American Publishers (Bide 1998). Legacy identifiers will also continue to be used for some of the digital objects within the CEDARS project scope, so - for example - some publishers will assign International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) to CD-ROMs or generate Serial Item and Contribution Numbers (SICIs) for online journal articles. On the other hand, other items in the project scope, electronic ephemera for example, are unlikely to have previously assigned persistent and unique identifiers.

An additional approach to ensuring the authenticity of a given digital object would be to use a simple cryptographic technique like the production of a validation key value or checksum for each resource in a digital archive. An authentication checksum could be computed from each resource in a digital archive and stored with the descriptive metadata. When a user, or the archive, wants to retrieve the resource at a later date this checksum could be computed again and compared with the checksum recorded in the metadata. If the two agree there can be confidence that the document retrieved is the one referred to by the descriptive metadata.

Archivists and records managers have similar concerns with authenticity, integrity and preserving 'evidentiality'. The University of Pittsburgh Electronic Records Project, for example, has defined a metadata model for business-acceptable communications (Bearman and Sochats 1996). A University of British Columbia project has also worked on defining the requirements for preserving reliable and authentic electronic records (Duranti and MacNeil 1996b).

2.3 Resource discovery

Digital resources that have been physically preserved will also need to be retrievable. For this reason, preservation systems will have to interact with resource discovery systems. Recommendations on resource discovery formats (e.g. Dublin Core) or metadata frameworks (e.g., Resource Description Format) will constitute an important part of CEDARS work on metadata.

2.4 Rights management

Solving rights management problems in a digital preservation context will be crucial to a practically based project like CEDARS. Within the project, different licensing arrangements will have to be made with relevant stakeholders. This rights management information can be stored as part of the descriptive metadata and this could be used to manage access to digital resources in the demonstrators.

2.5 Metadata for resource evaluation

Not all digital resources will be preserved and, indeed, not all digital resources will be worthy of long-term preservation. CEDARS is interested in helping to develop suitable collection management policies for research libraries.

2.6 Metadata management

Another important issue is how this metadata will be generated and where it will be kept. Metadata could be stored either in a centralised or distributed database and linked to the original resource. Alternatively, metadata could also be embedded in or otherwise directly associated with the original resource. Different solutions might be possible for different types of metadata. Resource discovery and rights management metadata could form part of a searchable database, while metadata specifying the technical formats used, the migration strategies operated and a document's use history could be stored with the document itself. Over a long period of time, this metadata will grow in size and will itself have to be subject to migration and authentication strategies.


3. Standards, formats and initiatives

This section will describe a variety of projects and initiatives that have relevance to preservation metadata. The earliest projects described here originated in the archives and records management communities. The Universities of Pittsburgh and British Columbia have carried out important recent research projects in North America and these will be described in more detail in this section. Other initiatives in the archives and records field which will not be described here include the National Archives of Canada's IMOSA project (McDonald 1993; 1995a; 1995b) and relevant implementations in supranational organisations (e.g. Barry 1994) and the pharmaceutical industry (Anderson 1997a; 1997b; Lord 1997; Binns, et al. 1997; Murdock 1997).

Other initiatives described here have originated in the library community, Dublin Core (from OCLC), the Australian PANDORA project and the RLG Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata. The remainder have a largely technical basis and emanate from the CCSDS, the USAF and the audio-visual community.


3.1 Digital Rosetta Stone (DRS) model

Brief description

The Digital Rosetta Stone (DRS) is a model for maintaining long-term access to digital documents by means of knowledge preservation in "metaknowledge archives". The model was developed by Steven B. Robertson of the United States Air Force (USAF) in a MSc thesis written at the Air Force Institute of Technology (Robertson 1996) and a paper co-written with his AFIT supervisor (Heminger and Robertson 1998).

The basis of the DRS is that current suggested strategies for the preservation of digital information, including migration and emulation, are not entirely satisfactory. Noting that the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 provided a key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian texts, Heminger and Robertson propose the creation of something similar to permit the recapture of digital information. Robertson (1996, p. 21) says:

To prevent the loss of our digital history, I propose that digital knowledge be preserved in a manner that I call the Digital Rosetta Stone (DRS). The data so preserved would be a collection of the knowledge and processes necessary to recover and reconstruct digital documents maintained in their original file formats. The data would be used to create or emulate the hardware and software necessary to recover data from obsolete storage media and reconstruct the digital documents.

The DRS would be composed of three processes:

The knowledge preservation is defined by Robertson (1996, p. 23) as "the process of gathering and preserving the vast amounts of knowledge needed to recover digital data from a superseded media and to reconstruct digital documents from their original formats". In the DRS this knowledge would be stored in a 'metaknowledge archive' (MKA). The MKA would contain (and preserve) knowledge in the areas of media storage techniques and file formats. Knowledge about media storage techniques would include the techniques in which bit patterns are stored and accessed on media so that information could be migrated to a new storage device. Information on file formats would include the techniques used by software applications to define formatting operations within digital documents (Robertson 1996, p. 25). Data recovery would include migration to a new media and the retrieval of a document using the media storage techniques information stored in the MKA. The final process, document reconstruction, would use the file formatting information stored in the MKA to reconstruct (where possible) something close to the original form of a document.

Documentation

The most comprehensive documentation for the DRS is Robertson's MSc thesis (Robertson 1996), which is available on the Web as a PDF file. A paper by Heminger and Robertson (1998) is a shorter description of the DRS and MKA and has been delivered at conferences in Hawaii (HICSS-31) and Tomar (DELOS6).

Metadata issues

Robertson (1996, pp. 27-33) suggests that a MKA should contain standardised templates which can preserve the relevant information (metadata). This would include:

Importance for CEDARS

The DRS conceptual model contains much which could be of interest to CEDARS. The collection and preservation of technical information on media storage techniques and file formats could be important. However, the DRS model does not specify in detail the metadata template that should be used in a MKA. Additionally, Robertson (1996, pp. 54-55) concludes that the development of a DRS would be a time-consuming and expensive task ... "very costly in terms of money, manpower, and other resources". He also suggests the creation of a governmental organisation, a Digital Rosetta Stone Office (DRSO) to maintain the MKA. It is far from clear that this is a sustainable economic model.

On the other hand, the MKA is an interesting concept because it amplifies and extends ideas inherent in the influential Scientific American article by Jeff Rothenberg (1995). It provides a model for the preservation of contextual information that might permit the reconstruction of digital information by means of digital rescue archaeology. The concept of a digital Rosetta Stone has also been proposed by the Universal Preservation Format initiative.


3.2. Dublin Core

Brief description

The Dublin Core is a 15-element metadata element set intended to facilitate the discovery of electronic resources. The format has been developed through a series of international workshops attended by librarians, computer specialists and other interested parties. The result is a fifteen-element core metadata set which can be used for resource discovery and for semantic interoperability between other metadata formats.

Documentation

Information on the history and development of Dublin Core can be found on the DC Web page based at OCLC:

Dublin Core Metadata. 1997. <URL:http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/>

All DC workshop reports are available on the Web (Weibel 1995; Weibel et al. 1995; Dempsey and Weibel 1996; Weibel, Iannella and Cathro 1997; Weibel and Hakala 1998). Recent descriptions of the initiative have also been published by Stu Weibel (1997; Weibel and Lagoze 1997) and Juha Hakala (1997).

Metadata issues

The simple 15 element metadata set is as follows:

  1. Title (Label: "Title")
  2. Author or Creator (Label: "Creator")
  3. Subject and Keywords (Label: "Subject")
  4. Description (Label: "Description")
  5. Publisher (Label: "Publisher")
  6. Other Contributor (Label: "Contributor")
  7. Date (Label: "Date")
  8. Resource Type (Label: "Type")
  9. Format (Label: "Format")
  10. Resource Identifier (Label: "Identifier")
  11. Source (Label: "Source")
  12. Language (Label: "Language")
  13. Relation (Label: "Relation")
  14. Coverage (Label: "Coverage")
  15. Rights Management (Label: "Rights")

Importance for CEDARS

DC is an important international initiative. The Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata, for example, provided an implementation of their own metadata scheme in DC. It might be sensible for CEDARS metadata to contain this core metadata in any case for resource discovery, although elements like "Resource Type", "Format" and "Rights Management" have direct relevance to preservation metadata.


3.3 PANDORA Logical Data Model, Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia (PANDORA), National Library of Australia

Brief description

Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia (PANDORA) is an operational 'proof-of-concept' digital archive based at the National Library of Australia (NLA) dedicated to the preservation of and long-term access to networked publications in Australia. It was established in 1996 with the following objectives (Cameron 1998):

  1. To develop policy and procedures for the preservation of and provision of access to Australian online publications
  2. To set up an archive of selected publications
  3. To quantify the resources required for implementation of medium to long term preservation strategies
  4. To develop a proposal for a national approach to the long-term preservation of these publications.

PANDORA developed a 'Logical Data Model' based on its own experiences and with reference to the work of the Task Force on the Archiving of Digital Information (1996) and OAIS.

Documentation

The PANDORA Web pages can be found at:

Cameron, S., 1998, PANDORA: Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia. Canberra: National Library of Australia. <URL:http://www.nla.gov.au/pandora/>

The detailed 'Logical Data Model' is also available on the Web, at:

National Library of Australia, 1997, PANDORA Logical Data Model, Version 2, 10 November 1997. <URL:http://www.nla.gov.au/pandora/ldmv2.html>

Metadata issues

Descriptive metadata for each object are stored in the NLA's library management system. Items in PANDORA are identified by means of a Persistent Uniform Resource Identifier (PURL). The PANDORA Logical Data Model description (NLA 1997) contains an entity-relationship diagram that identifies the logical entities that need to be supported. These include the following:

Identification

Descriptive Attribute

 

Descriptive Attribute Type

 

Publication

Selection and negotiation

Decision Rule

 

Event Type

 

Negotiation Status

 

Organisation

 

Selection Status

Capture

Capture Procedure

 

Capture Procedure Type

 

Gathering Frequency

 

Gathering Regime

 

Source URL

Preservation

Browser Type

 

Copy

 

Copy of Issue

 

File

 

File Type

 

Format

 

Format Type

 

Issue

 

Process

 

Process Type

 

Publisher Preferred Browser

Rights Management and Access Control

Access Profile

 

Access Right

 

NLA Copyright Warning

 

Publisher Copyright Statement

 

User Class

Each of these entities has additional metadata. So, for example, the "Copy" entity might consist of a Publication Identifier, a Copy Identifier and Date Captured/Acquired. The "Descriptive Attribute Type" might contain the following metadata:

The PANDORA entities (metadata) are fully described in the PANDORA Logical Data Model document (NLA 1997).

Importance for CEDARS

The PANDORA Logical Data Model is interesting for CEDARS in that it permits the use of metadata to record and manage a variety for a variety of functions: Identification, Selection, Capture, Preservation and Rights Management.


3.4 Open Archival Information System (OAIS)

Brief description

The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) is working to develop standards for the long-term preservation of digital information obtained from observations of the terrestrial and space environments and which could also apply to other long-term digital archives. ISO aims to provide a framework and common terminology that may be used by Government and commercial sectors in the request and provision of digital archive services.

Documentation

Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, 1998, Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), ed. L. Reich and D. Sawyer. CCSDS 650.0-W-3.0, White Book, 15 April. <URL:ftp://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/sfdu/isoas/us12/CCSDS-650.0-W-3.pdf>

NASA/Science Office of Standards and Technology (NOST), ISO Archiving Standards - Overview. <URL:http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/>

Digital Archive Directions Workshop, 1998, Important Concepts from the draft ISO standard "Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS)". Summary for: Digital Archive Directions (DADs) Workshop, National Archives and Records Administration, Archives II, College Park, Md., 22-26 June. <URL:http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/dads/OAISOverview.html>

Metadata issues

OAIS has a Taxonomy of Archival information object classes that includes

Importance for CEDARS

The OAIS Taxonomy is definitely of interest for CEDARS.


3.5 The Pittsburgh Project: Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping, University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences

Brief description

The Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping project (the Pittsburgh Project) was funded by the US National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and carried out at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, co-directed by James Williams and Richard J. Cox. David Bearman of Archives and Museum Informatics, an influential writer on archival issues (e.g. Pederson 1995; Cook 1997), was consultant to the project. Adrian Cunningham (1996, p. 319) has commented that the Pittsburgh Project "produced an alternative model [to the one embodied in the UBC Project] which is based upon a redefinition of archival thinking". This redefinition was informed by the work of archivists in North America and Australia and by the ongoing litigation over the preservation of US Government's e-mail known as the PROFS case (Bearman 1993; Wallace 1998).

The core aim of the project was to "develop viable recordkeeping functional requirements through an analysis of the professional literature and via consultation with experts in the management of archives and records" (Cox 1997). What emerged was the idea of an electronic recordkeeping system that could support the capture, maintenance and continued usability of records. In addition to producing the functional requirements for such a system, the Pittsburgh Project also investigated the concept of literary warrant, [...] "records are created because of legal, regulatory, professional best practices, and other reasons generally external to the organisation" (Cox 1997).

Documentation

The project Web page is based at the University of Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences, Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping. <URL:http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/>

The pages include the project proposal, progress reports and a Framework for Business Acceptable Communications. It also includes Kimberly Barata's annotated bibliography:

Barata, K., 1996, Bibliography on Electronic Records. <URL:http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/bibtc.html>

Other project descriptions include ones published by David Bearman and Wendy Duff (1996) and Richard Cox (1997). Bearman has additionally published some important papers on managing electronic records in contemporary organisations (Bearman 1994) and on future directions for archives (Bearman 1989; 1995).

Metadata issues

Metadata issues issuing from the Pittsburgh Project have been outlined by David Wallace (1993; 1995) and Wendy Duff (1995). The functional requirements for recordkeeping are available on the Web <URL:http://www.lis.pitt.edu/~nhprc/prog1.html> and in an appendix of Electronic evidence (Bearman 1994, pp. 294-304):

Organisation

1. Compliant

Recordkeeping Systems

2. Accountable

 

3. Implemented

 

4. Reliable

Records - Captured

5. Comprehensive

 

6. Identifiable

 

7. Complete

 

7a. Accurate

 

7b. Understandable

 

7c. Meaningful

 

8. Authentic

Records- Maintained

9. Preserved

 

9a. Inviolate

 

9b. Coherent

 

9c. Audible

 

10. Removable

Records - Usable

11. Exportable

 

12. Accessible

 

12a. Available

 

12b. Renderable

 

12c. Evidential

 

13. Redactable

The metadata specification (Bearman and Sochats 1996) is based on these functional requirements and consists of:

I

HANDLE LAYER

I.A.

Record Identification Metadata

I.A.1.

Record-Declaration

I.A.2.

Transaction-Domain-Identifier

I.A.3.

Transaction-Instance-Identifier

I.B

Information Discovery Content Metadata

I.B.1.

Content-Description-Standard

I.B.2.

Content-Descriptor

I.B.3.

Record-Natural-Language

II.

TERMS & CONDITIONS LAYER

II.A.

Restrictions Status Metadata

II.A.1.

Access-Rights-Status

II.A.2.

Use-Rights-Status

II.B.

Access Conditions Metadata

II.B.1.

Access-Conditions-Resolver

II.B.2.

Resolver-Terms

II.C.

Use Conditions Metadata

II.C.1.

Use-Conditions-Resolver

II.C.2.

Use-Terms

II.C.2.a.

Use-Citation

II.C.2.b.

Redacted-Record-Rule

II.C.2.c.

License-Terms

II.D.

Disposition Requirements Metadata

II.D.1.

Removal-Authority

II.D.2.

Retention-Policy-Citation

II.D.3.

Retention- Authority Issuance

II.D.4.

Retention-External-Authority

II.D.5.

Retention-Period-End-Time

II.D.6.

Disposition-Instruction-Code

III

STRUCTURAL LAYER

III.A.

File Identification Metadata

III.A.1.

File-ID

III.B.

File Encoding Metadata

III.B.1.

File-Modality

III.B.2.

File-Data-Representation

III.B.3.

Data-Codes

III.B.4.

Compression-Method

III.B.5.

Encryption-Method

III.C.

File Rendering Metadata

III.C.1.

Application-Dependency

III.C.2.

Software-Environment-Dependency

III.C.3.

Hardware-Dependency

III.C.4.

Rendering-Rules

III.C.5.

Representation-Standard/De Facto Standard

III.D.

Record Rendering Metadata

III.D.1.

File-Linking-Rule/Standard

III.D.2.

File-Interchange-Standard: Version

III.E.

Content Structure Metadata

III.E.1.

Content-Structure

III.E.2.

Content-Data Set

III.E.3.

Application-Dictionary

III.E.4.

Delimiters/Labels

III.E.5.

Data Value-Lookup Tables

III.E.6.

Data View-at Creation

III.E.7.

Version-Relationships

III.E.8.

Set-Relationships

III.E.9.

Dynamic-Relationships

III.F.

Source Metadata

III.F.1.

Data-Source

III.F.2.

Data-Source-System-Documentation

III.F.3.

Data Capture-Instrument-Type

III.F.4.

Data Capture-Instrument-Settings

III.F.5.

Source Data-Quality

IV.

CONTEXTUAL LAYER

IV.A.6.

Linked-Prior Transaction

IV.A.7.

Action-Requested

IV.A.8.

Recipient Specific-Configuration Data

IV.B.

Responsibility Metadata

IV.B.1.

Originating-Organization

IV.B.2.

Authorization

IV.C.

System Accountability Metadata

IV.C.1.

System Audit-Responsible

IV.C.2.

System Audit-Implemented

IV.C.3.

System Audit-Consistent

V.

CONTENT LAYER

V.A.

Content

V.A.1.

Content-Created

V.A.2.

Content-Incorporated

VI.

USE HISTORY LAYER

VI.A.

Use History Metadata

VI.A.1.

Use-Type

VI.A.3.

Use-Instance-Time

VI.A.4.

Use-Instance-User

VI.A.5.

Use-Evidential Consequences

This metadata specification has been mapped to ISAD(G) (Bearman and Duff 1996) and DC (Bearman 1997 [?]).

Importance for CEDARS

Although designed for archives and to preserve the "evidentiality" of records, the Pittsburgh metadata specification is an important piece of work that has relevance to work being carried out in CEDARS.


3.6 Research Libraries Group (RLG) Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata

Brief description

The RLG Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata was constituted in May 1997 and charged with identifying the kinds of information (metadata) required by the preservation community to manage a digital master file over time. Its precise objectives (RLG PRESERV 1997) were to:

  1. Review Dublin Core and the work of the PCC Core Bibliographic Record for Computer Files Task Force and recommend back to RLG's PRESERV Advisory Council (PAC) whether there are pieces of information that are missing from those recommendations which will prevent us from having preservation information contained in core specifications.
  2. Review the current thinking within the RLG Working Group on Preservation and Reformatting Information to ensure that outcomes are consistent.
  3. Review the recommendations of the PRESERV "Balaclava" Task Force (Task Force to Investigate Preservation Information to Accompany Digital Files, 1996) as they relate to master files.
  4. Identify data elements associated with master files which have preservation-based intent.

The Working Group produced a report (Preliminary: January 1998, Final: May 1998) outlining suitable metadata elements for digital image files (RLG Working Group 1998). The WG noted that other information, like copyright and use-restriction data, is important and could be recorded at the same time as a digital master is being created.

Documentation

The RLG Working Group report is available on the Web at:

RLG Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata, 1998, Final report. Mountain View, Calif.: Research Libraries Group, May. <URL:http://www.rlg.org/preserv/presmeta.html>

The Working Group's charge can be found at:

RLG PRESERV, 1997, RLG Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata. 12 February. <URL:http://www.rlg.org/preserv/metadata.html>

Metadata issues

RLG working group deemed the following 16 metadata elements crucial to the continued viability of a digital image master:

  1. Date
  2. Transcriber
  3. Producer
  4. Capture Device
  5. Capture Details
  6. Change History
  7. Validation Key
  8. Encryption
  9. Watermark
  10. Resolution
  11. Compression
  12. Source
  13. Color
  14. Color Management
  15. Color Bar/Gray Scale Bar
  16. Control Targets

The report also published implementations in DC, USMARC and XML. For example, the Dublin Core implementation looks like this:

DC.Title: [Title of digitized item]
DC.Creator.PersonalName: [Author or creator of intellectual content]
DC.Creator.Role: Author
DC.Contributor.CorporateName: [Agency responsible for transcribing metadata]
DC.Creator.Role: Transcriber (Metadata)
DC.Contributor.CorporateName: [Agency to which digitization was outsourced]
DC.Contributor.Role: [Producer]
DC.Contributor.CorporateName.Address: [Address of outsourcing agency]
DC.Publisher: [Institution responsible for digitization]
DC.Date: [date digital preservation copy created--YYYY-DD-MM]
DC.Form: Image

RLG.Form.Capture: [Make and model of scanner or digital camera and relevant capture details]
RLG.Form.Validation: [Validation Key, Watermark]
RLG.Form.Encryption: [Encryption technique]
RLG.Form.Compression.Method [e.g., JPEG, LZW]
RLG.Form.Compression.Level [value including capture device information that makes this information meaningful]
RLG.Form.Color: [The color palette with which the associated image or information is rendered]
RLG.Form.ColorManagement: [Associated color management systems]
RLG.Form.Resolution: [e.g., pixel dimensions, dpi, ppi, mtf]
RLG.Form.Modification: [Change History]

DC.Description: [Color Bar/Gray Scale Bar; Control targets]
DC.Identifier: [URL of document if metadata not carried in header]
DC.Source.Date: [Date of print version that is digitally reproduced]
DC.Source.Publisher: [publisher of print version that is digitally reproduced]
RLG.Source.Condition: [Physical condition of source item, etc.]

NOTE: Alternatively, instead of source use RELATION element to identify print version:

DC.Relation
DC.Relation.Type: IsVersionOf
DC.Relation.Identifier: [e.g., catalog record no. for original]

Importance for CEDARS

The report of the RLG Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata is an important document for CEDARS and for other projects. It is one of very few initiatives that has attempted to identify the actual metadata elements required for preservation. Its main drawback is that the sixteen metadata elements relate primarily to digital images. CEDARS could attempt to use the RLG elements as a basis for recording metadata about digital image files and consider supplementing the RLG list with elements relevant for other formats.


3.7 Joint European Broadcasting Union-Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (EBU-SMPTE) Task Force on Harmonised Standards for the Exchange of Television Programme Material as Bit Streams

Brief description

The EBU-SMPTE Task Force was set up in 1996 and was born out of a realisation that the coming explosion in the use of digital production technology in television could bring with it interoperability problems (Bradshaw 1998). The Task Force's objective is the establishment of efficient and interoperable methods of exchanging television programme materials between systems.

The Task Force recognised that a core enabling-infrastructure is needed to facilitate the archiving and retrieval of televisual material. It proposed the development of systems based on automatic, machine-generated, metadata supplemented by additional Knowing that there is unlikely to be any 'standard' metadata implementation, the Task Force suggested defining metadata exchange between systems.

Documentation

The EBU-SMPTE Task Force Web page is at:

European Broadcasting Union, 1998, Joint EBU SMPTE Task Force: Harmonised Standards for the Exchange of Television Programme Material as Bit Streams. <URL:http://www.ebu.ch/pmc_es_tf.html>

A 'Request for Technology' (RFT) with regard to metadata and file wrappers is available at:

Task Force for Harmonised Standards for the Exchange of Television Programme Material as Bit Streams, 1997, Request for technology: "Metadata and file Wrappers", "Networking and protocols for audio, video and metadata transfers. European Broadcasting Union / Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. <URL:http://www.ebu.ch/pmc_estf_rft.pdf>

Metadata issues

The Joint Task Force have defined a Metadata Dictionary Core Structure which looks like this (Bradshaw 1998):

0.0 Data Transport Metadata + Dictionary ID (Wrapper)
1.0 Essential Metadata - "metadata items necessary to identify, open and define the elements to follow"
2.0 Access - to control access
3.0 Parametrics - camera parametric data
4.0 Heritage - how the video was composed
5.0 Temporal - dates, time-codes, etc.
6.0 Geospatial
7.0 Descriptive - language descriptions of content
8.0 Other Registered Elements
9.0 Other User Defined Elements

Unique identifiers would appear in Class 1 (Essential Metadata) and would be an important key to the EBU-SMPTE Metadata Dictionary.

Importance for CEDARS

No direct importance to CEDARS (yet). EBU-SMPTE Metadata is currently less concerned with preservation than making archive video available for commercial motives in the new digital TV environment. Standards developed here may, however, impact on other areas of digital technology storage and re-use.


3.8 The UBC Project: The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia.

Brief description

An investigation of the Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records was a three-year project (1994-1997) funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) and carried out by the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. It is usually referred to as the "UBC Project". Its aim was to "identify and define the requirements for creating, handling and preserving reliable and authentic electronic records". Project objectives included:

The methodological approach of the UBC project was to determine whether presuppositions about the nature of 'records' originating in the disciplines of diplomatics and archival science were relevant and useful in the new electronic environment. Diplomatics is a body of concepts and methods, dating from the seventeenth century, which help prove the reliability and authenticity of documents (Duranti and MacNeil 1996b, p. 47). The UBC project was, therefore, largely concerned with the concepts of 'reliability' and 'authenticity' in an archival context (Duranti 1995):

Reliability is, therefore, something exclusively linked to record creation while authenticity, according to Duranti and MacNeil (1996b, p. 56), is linked to "the record's mode, form, and state of transmission, and to the manner of its preservation and custody, and [ensures that it] is protected and guaranteed through the adoption of methods that ensure that the record is not manipulated, altered, or otherwise falsified after its creation ...". The UBC Project investigators believe that archival custody is important to ensure authenticity once records have become inactive. Duranti (1996), in particular, has criticised David Bearman's 'non-custodial' approach to archives (e.g. Bearman 1991) and the concept of 'distributed custody' developed by Australian Archives (e.g. Upward and McKemmish 1994). She points out that "the authenticity of inactive records traditionally has been protected by physically transferring them to an archival institution or programme and, once transferred, by arranging and describing them" (Duranti 1997, p. 61). The replacement of archival description by the automated capture of contextual metadata (as proposed by the Pittsburgh Project) is accordingly rejected (MacNeil 1995). Duranti maintains that metadata are inadequate "because metadata do not contain 'historical' context, but only the contextual data contemporary to records creation, and because they only record the limited contextual fabric that a document has within the electronic system in which it exists" (Duranti 1996, p. 252).

Documentation

The project is briefly described on the project home page:

Duranti, L, Eastwood, T. and MacNeil, H., 1997, The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records.

Vancouver: University of British Columbia, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. <URL:http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/duranti/>

In addition, there are a number of progress reports (Duranti and Eastwood 1995; Duranti, MacNeil and Underwood 1996; Duranti and MacNeil 1996a; MacNeil 1997) and a published project overview written by Luciana Duranti and Heather MacNeil (1996b).

Metadata issues

The UBC Project is interesting because it rejects the Pittsburgh Project's emphasis on the development of functional specifications for record-keeping systems with record evidentiality preserved by means of metadata. It makes a strong case for the physical custody by archival institutions of electronic records and notes the importance of archival description in this context.

In addition, the UBC investigators developed a set of eight templates that identify the necessary and sufficient components of records in both traditional and electronic recordkeeping environments (Duranti and MacNeil 1996b). These templates (available on the UBC Project home page) define the necessary and sufficient components of:

Some of the attributes in the resulting 'document profile' could be considered to comprise metadata. These attributes include:

Importance for CEDARS

As a project primarily concerned with archives, the UBC Project is not of direct relevance to CEDARS. However, its concern with authenticity and archives as the upholders of this authenticity might have relevance to any concerns CEDARS may have with intellectual preservation, i.e. to what extent can data creators or publishers be trusted not to delete or change digital objects under their control. This raises all sorts of other issues about the custodial role of digital archives, including CEDARS.


3.9 Universal Preservation Format (UPF)

Brief description

The Universal Preservation Format (UPF) is a WGBH Foundation sponsored initiative, part-funded by a NHPRC grant, to advocate a platform-independent format which will help make accessible a wide variety of data types. A UPF will be particularly important for audio-visual data (e.g. video-archives) where there exist very large collections of material, e.g. material on deteriorating analogue tapes, which can be preferably transferred to a single format. Thom Shepard (1997) comments that the initiative's central goal is to "work with representatives from standards organisations, hardware and software companies, museums, academic institutions, archives and library science communities to produce and publish a Recommended Practices document". The initiative is connected with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) who have assigned an official Study Group for it (Shepard 1997).

A UPF would include a wrapper (or container) with a framework structure (on the Warwick Framework (e.g. Dempsey and Weibel 1996; Weibel and Lagoze 1997) model) which would be used for storing both digital content and metadata.

Documentation

Information on the UPF can be found on the UPF Web page. This gives access to a varierty of Web-based documents on the proposed format including papers by Dave MacCarn (1997) and Shepard (1997):

Shepard, T., 1998, UPF Home. Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation. <URL:http://info.wgbh.org/upf/>

Metadata issues

The UPF initiative does not propose the adoption of any particular metadata. It proposes a model based on self-describing wrappers (containers) that contain both content and metadata which can explain what particular content is there and how to use it. Wrapper technologies investigated by MacCarn (1997) include Apple's Bento specification, Avid Technology's Open Media Framework (OMF) Interchange and the work of the European Broadcasting Union-SMPTE Task Force on creating an exchange format for video materials.

UPF has also noted the major importance of unique identifiers and expects to include such a system or systems in its Recommended Practice note.

Importance for CEDARS

It is too early to accurately assess UPF's importance for CEDARS's metadata work. Some of the concepts used in UPF, however, may be useful for other CEDARS Working Groups.


4. Preliminary conclusions and recommendations

The projects, initiatives and formats reviewed in this report show that much work remains to be done. There is one set of metadata data elements (RLG Working Group) for digital images, and good detailed specifications for metadata from PANDORA and the Pittsburgh NHPRC project. These in particular need to be studied in more detail. The OAIS model is also useful. Other initiatives, especially the EBU-SMPTE Task Force, UPF and the UBC Project are not directly relevant to CEDARS concerns with regard to metadata, but are worth "keeping tabs" on.

A few preliminary recommendations:

The adoption of persistent and unique identifiers is vital, both in the CEDARS project and outside.

Many of these initiatives mention "wrappers", "containers" and "frameworks". Some thought should be given to how metadata should be integrated with data content in CEDARS.

Authenticity (or intellectual preservation) is going to be important. It will be interesting to investigate whether some archivists' concerns with custody or "distributed custody" will have relevance to CEDARS.


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6. Glossary of Abbreviations and Acronyms

AHDS

Arts and Humanities Data Service

CCSDS

Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems

CD-ROM

Compact Disc - Read Only Memory

CEDARS

CURL Exemplars in Digital ArchiveS

CURL

Consortium of University Research Libraries

DADs

Digital Archive Directions Workshop

DC

Dublin Core

DOI

Digital Object Identifier

EBU

European Broadcasting Union

eLib

Electronic Libraries Programme

ICA

International Council on Archives

IEEE

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force

IMF

International Monetary Fund

IMOSA

Information Management and Office Systems Advancement

ISAD(G)

General International Standard Archival Description

ISBN

International Standard Book Number

ISO

International Organisation for Standardisation

JISC

Joint Information Systems Committee

NASA

National Aeronautics and Space Agency

NCSA

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

NHPRC

National Historical Publications and Records Commission

NLA

National Library of Australia

OAIS

Open Archival Information System

OCLC

Online Computer Library Center

PANDORA

Preserving and Accessing Networked DOcumentary Resources of Australia

RDF

Resource Description Framework

RFC

Request for Comments

RLG

Research Libraries Group

SGML

Standard Generalised Markup Language

SMPTE

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers

SSHRCC

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

UBC

University of British Columbia

UPF

Universal Preservation Format

URN

Uniform Resource Name

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium

XML

Extensible Markup Language


7. Acknowledgements

Section 2 of this report is based on a paper given at the Sixth DELOS Workshop: Preservation of Digital Information, Tomar, Portugal, 18 June 1998.

UKOLN is funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre, the Joint Information Services Committee of the UK Higher Education Funding councils, as well as by project funding from JISC's eLib Programme and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath, where it is based.


Created and maintained by: Michael Day, Research Officer, UKOLN: The UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Page created: 27-Jul-1998
Last updated: 03-Aug-1998
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