Preservation Metadata for Digital Objects: A Review of the State of the Art

In March 2000, OCLC and RLG announced their commitment to collaborate on identifying and supporting best practices for the long-term retention of digital objects. This collaboration would take the form of facilitating consensus-building activity among key stakeholders in the area of digital preservation: in other words, bringing together leading experts to review existing practices, share expertise, and identify best practices/common approaches where possible. Because digital preservation is such a broad area, it was necessary to specify from the outset several areas of focus for the OCLC/RLG collaboration. One area involves the identification of the attributes of a digital archive for research repositories. The second area, and the one which is the subject of this document, is the use of metadata to support the digital preservation process. To address this second area, representatives from OCLC and RLG (the Planning Committee listed below) organized the OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata. The primary objective of the Working Group is to develop a comprehensive preservation metadata framework applicable to a broad range of digital preservation activity. The Working Group will also address ancillary issues such as the specification of preservation metadata elements and the evaluation of implementation strategies.