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ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 39 | June 1999


NLA at work

Metadata for preservation: NLA initiatives well received

For the past few months, a small working group of National Library staff members has been devising a set of metadata elements to describe digital library materials (digital objects) in order to facilitate their preservation. Many readers will be familiar with the Dublin Core metadata element set that has been designed principally to enable the discovery and retrieval of publications currently available on the Web. However, libraries with preservation responsibilities need a way of describing electronic materials that goes beyond the capabilities of Dublin Core or MARC records. Hence the need for a preservation metadata element set.

How digital objects will be preserved is still a matter for research, experiment and debate. Two strategies currently receiving a lot of attention are migration and emulation. Migration involves digital objects being moved progressively from each current software and hardware environment to the next. Emulation has the requirement that the software and hardware environment for which an object was created be reproduced in the future to enable the object to be displayed. Both of these solutions require the keeping of detailed information about the object and the processes to which it has been subjected.

The National Library’s preservation metadata set extends the work already done by the Research Libraries Group to define elements for the description of images that have been digitised. We need to be able to describe and preserve not only digitised collections such as IMAGES1, but also collections of original electronic (‘born digital’) items, including the PANDORA Archive of Australian Internet publications, and our collection of Australian electronic publications in physical formats (CD-ROMs and floppy discs).

Other libraries around the world have the same need and there has already been some interest expressed in the work that we are doing. An early draft of the National Library’s preservation metadata element set was sent to the Cedars (CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives) Project in the United Kingdom, at their request, to provide input to their own work in this area. Positive feedback and some useful constructive criticism have been received in return. The Research Libraries Group has also provided favourable comment on the work done so far.

For further information contact Colin Webb; email cwebb@nla.gov.au

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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au

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