Article Summary #5: Digital Preservation Metadata Standards, a LS 566 Post

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Angela Dappert and Markus Enders in Digital Preservation Metadata Standards discuss metadata within digital repositories. Digital repositories do not just act as a preservation tool for digital objects. They do everything from ingest information to providing access to that information with everything in-between. Repositories also actively work to prevent loss of the data in their care. Metadata is key to the preservation functions. There are several types of metadata that Dappaert and Enders split into four categories.

Description which describes the intellectual entity through properties. Structural which deals with the physical and logical structural relationships. Administrative which is about who handles the care of the digital object(s); it is also referred to as Preservation Metadata. Each of these categories are expanded or combined with another category to create the different standards used in Digital Repositories, i.e. LMER, PREMIS, METS, MPEG-21, and Z39.87. Dappert and Enders explain that there are so many options and the field is still relatively young to set any metadata standard in stone.

Reading this article just made the final piece click in my head how mind boggling complex metadata can be. It's a 3D puzzle with hundreds of possible solutions. I feel like I should sit down with each standard method and spend a week studying each of them. Maybe a week and a half. I do like the fact that they point out that this is still a developing and relatively new field, a fact that I think slips peoples minds because we are so accustom to technology. There are many points in different standards that have to connect to other standards to be able to be shared and, given how many standards there are available, is a massive undertaking.