A Daunting PREMIS: Implementing Preservation Metadata within the METS Framework

Presented at 2006 International Conference on Digital Archive Technologies (ICDAT2006)

Jerome P. McDonough
Graduate School of Library & Information Science, UIUC

19-20 October 2006

NOTES: One of the goals for the PREMIS framework working group was to define an implementation that would work with other forms of metadata that repositories would need to store for digital objects, including other forms of administrative metadata, as well as descriptive and structural metadata. A key aspect of any digital library object repository is going to be a structural metadata standard that allows you to bind content, descriptive metadata, and administrative metadata such as PREMIS into a single coherent entity. The METS standard, developed by the Digital Library Federation, was intended to provide just such a structural metadata standard.

The METS standard was developed by the Digital Library Federation as a successor effort to the Making of America II project, which sought to define a general service model for digital libraries, along with a common standard for digital library object encoding. The intent of METS was to create a single, XML-based document format that could fulfill the roles of Submission Information Package, Archival Information Package, and Dissemination Information Package within the OAIS Reference model.

That being a rather tall order, it was decided to limit the scope of METS to digital library objects comprised of text, images, audio or video files, or some combination thereof. METS has been publicly available for about 5 years now, and maintenance activity for the standard is on-going, and conducted under the auspices of both the METS editorial board and the Library of Congress in the US.