Digital Preservation Metadata For Practitioners

This book begins with an introduction to fundamental issues related to digital preservation metadata before proceeding to in-depth coverage of issues concerning its practical use and implementation. It helps readers to understand which options need to be considered in specifying a digital preservation metadata profile to ensure it matches their individual content types, technical infrastructure, and organizational needs. Further, it provides practical guidance and examples, and raises important questions. It does not provide full-fledged implementation solutions, as such solutions can, by definition, only be specific to a given preservation context. As such, the book effectively bridges the gap between the formal specifications provided in a standard, such as the PREMIS Data Dictionary – a de-facto standard that defines the core metadata required by most preservation repositories – and specific implementations. Anybody who needs to manage digital assets in any form with the intent of preserving them for an indefinite period of time will find this book a valuable resource. The PREMIS Data Dictionary provides a data model consisting of basic entities (objects, agents, events and rights) and basic properties (called “semantic units”) that describe them. The key challenge addressed is that of determining which information one needs to keep, together with one’s digital assets, so that they can be understood and used in the long-term – in other words, exactly which metadata one needs. The book will greatly benefit beginners and current practitioners alike. It is equally targeted at digital preservation repository managers and metadata analysts who are responsible for digital preservation metadata, as it is at students in Library, Information and Archival Science degree programs or related fields. Further, it can be used at the conception stage of a digital preservation system or for self-auditing an existing system.

This new edition of Digital Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums is the most current, complete guide to digital preservation available today. For administrators and practitioners alike, the information in this book is presented readably, focusing on management issues and best practices. Although this book addresses technology, it is not solely focused on technology. After all, technology changes and digital preservation is aimed for the long term. This is not a how-to book giving step-by-step processes for certain materials in a given kind of system. Instead, it addresses a broad group of resources that could be housed in any number of digital preservation systems. Finally, this book is about “things (not technology; not how-to; not theory) I wish I knew before I got started.” Digital preservation is concerned with the life cycle of the digital object in a robust and all-inclusive way. Many Europeans and some North Americans may refer to digital curation to mean the same thing, taking digital preservation to be the very limited steps and processes needed to insure access over the long term. The authors take digital preservation in the broadest sense of the term: looking at all aspects of curating and preserving digital content for long term access. The book is divided into four part: 1.Situating Digital Preservation, 2.Management Aspects, 3.Technology Aspects, and 4.Content-Related Aspects. Digital Preservation will answer questions that you might not have even known you had, leading to more successful digital preservation initiatives.

There is growing recognition of the need to address the fragility of digital information, on which our society heavily depends for smooth operation in all aspects of daily life. This has been discussed in many books and articles on digital preservation, so why is there a need for yet one more? Because, for the most part, those other publications focus on documents, images and webpages – objects that are normally rendered to be simply displayed by software to a human viewer. Yet there are clearly many more types of digital objects that may need to be preserved, such as databases, scientific data and software itself. David Giaretta, Director of the Alliance for Permanent Access, and his contributors explain why the tools and techniques used for preserving rendered objects are inadequate for all these other types of digital objects, and they provide the concepts, techniques and tools that are needed. The book is structured in three parts. The first part is on theory, i.e., the concepts and techniques that are essential for preserving digitally encoded information. The second part then shows practice, i.e., the use and validation of these tools and techniques. Finally, the third part concludes by addressing how to judge whether money is being well spent, in terms of effectiveness and cost sharing. Various examples of digital objects from many sources are used to explain the tools and techniques presented. The presentation style mainly aims at practitioners in libraries, archives and industry who are either directly responsible for preservation or who need to prepare for audits of their archives. Researchers in digital preservation and developers of preservation tools and techniques will also find valuable practical information here. Researchers creating digitally encoded information of all kinds will also need to be aware of these topics so that they can help to ensure that their data is usable and can be valued by others now and in the future. To further assist the reader, the book is supported by many hours of videos and presentations from the CASPAR project and by a set of open source software.

This book addresses the process of maintaining digital objects through time to ensure continued access, an aspect that has become a crucial issue in recent years. It offers a concise yet comprehensive discussion of key concepts and requirements for long-term digital preservation, and presents a pioneering framework for digital repositories that enables the long-term archiving and metadata management for large volumes of digital resources based on a system that has already been completely designed and launched. In the framework, the reliability of information readouts is ensured by the repository with two-level data recording replication and monitoring mechanisms in the repository management system (RMS) and the file systems, and by the RMS’s distributed nature. The advanced RMS allows operations on the archival storage to be scheduled, while also taking into account low energy consumption requirements. After presenting the framework in detail, the book assesses and demonstrates the approach’s viability in terms of delivering accessibility, authenticity and usability. As such, the book offers a valuable resource for information technology (IT) researchers and practitioners, as well as archivists and librarians.

Digital preservation is an issue faced by practitioners in Ross Harveythe library and recordkeeping professions, yet most professionalshave little time to keep up with the latest techniquesand standards. This invaluable work provides asingle-volume introduction to the principles, strategies and practices currently applied by librarians and recordkeepers to the preservation of digital information and will assist them to make informed decisions about the role of digital information in their care.The book is presented in four parts: Why do we preserve? What do we preserve? How do we preserve? and How do we manage digital preservation?Each part covers the area in detail and addresses current issues in a clear and informative manner. The terminology of the field is explained clearly throughout the book. Each chapter includes a range of case studies from institutionsat the forefront of digital object preservation. An index facilitates quick access.This book will be essential as a professional reference tool for all librarians, recordkeepers and archivists with preservation responsibilities as well as being a definitive source of information for the whole profession including students.

Digital preservation is an issue of huge importance to the library and information profession right now. With the widescale adoption of the internet and the rise of the WWW, the world has been overwhelmed by digital information. Digital data is being produced on a massive scale by individuals and institutions: some of it is born, lives and dies only in digital form, and it is the potential death of this data that is the concern of this volume. So how can information professionals try to remedy this situation? Digital preservation is a complex issue, with many different aspects and views, so in this book each chapter is written by an international expert on the topic. Many case studies and examples are used to ground the ideas and theories in real concerns and practice. This volume will arm the information professional with the knowledge they need about this important and pressing issue and give examples of best practice to help find a way to a solution for this problem. Chapters cover: formats of digital data authenticity of digital data preservation strategies international trends in digital preservation web archiving metadata institutional policies the cost of digital preservation and cost of data loss. Written by leading international experts in digital library development, each book in the Digital Futures series examines in detail some of the key strategic and practical issues facing libraries and other cultural institutions in the rapidly expanding world of digital information. Readership: This is an indispensable guide for all information managers, librarians and archivists. Others in the information and culture world, such as museum curators, media professionals and web content providers will also find it essential reading, as will students of digital culture on library and information studies and other courses.

At a time when digitization technology has become well established in library operations, the need for a degree of standardization of metadata practices has become more acute, in order to ensure digital libraries the degree of interoperability long established in traditional libraries. The complex metadata requirements of digital objects, which include descriptive, administrative and structural metadata, have so far mitigated against the emergence of a single standard. Metadata is data about data. "Data associated with objects, which relives their potential users having to have full advance knowledge of their existence and characteristics. In other words standard bibliographic information summaries, indexing terms and abstracts is all surrogates. Metadata for Digital Collections brings together innovative studies focusing on fundamental issues related to digital preservation metadata before proceeding to in-depth coverage of issues concerning its practical use and implementation. Tackling the salient issues of cataloging and indexing, Metadata and Organizing Educational Resources on the Internet, this book examines the status quo of cataloging Internet resources explores the relationship between traditional cataloging and current trends in information management. The combination of current research and practical guidelines is a unique strength of this book. The richness of the collections that have appeared on the Web from these disparate quarters has made an exceptional contribution to the higher education community, but for those hoping to use them the overall experience can be a somewhat daunting one. This book assists information professionals in improving the usability of digital objects by adequately documenting them and using tools for metadata management. For administrators and practitioners alike, the information in this book will be of interest, focusing on management issues and best practices.