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: 2400 metadata records and counting.
Consider now the metadata needed to ingest a digital edition of the entire journal run of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (starting From 1655).

Librarians have lots of experience dealing with two or three metadata records per object. We have no experience dealing with 2400 metadata records for one object.
We do not know the specific types of user activities or relative levels of use that this metadata will have to support, because we’ve never done it before. We *do* know there can be performance issues in parsing and manipulating extremely large, multi-schema XML documents.
We need to consider the implications of moving from a world in which metadata is stored in relatively static databases to systems which are highly transactional In nature and think about how to best architect our objects, as well as our systems, to support the uses we deem likely to emerge both from our user communities and amongst ourselves.