Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS)

PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) was an international working group concerned with developing metadata for use in digital preservation.

In 2003 the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and Research Libraries Group (RLG) established the PREMIS working group, which consisted of a multi-national roster of more than thirty representatives from the cultural, government, and private sectors, in order to define implementable, core preservation metadata, with guidelines/recommendations for management and use. PREMIS was “charged to define a set of semantic units that are implementation independent, practically oriented, and likely to be needed by most preservation repositories”.

In May 2005, PREMIS released Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata: Final Report of the PREMIS Working Group. This 237-page report includes: PREMIS Data Dictionary 1.0: a comprehensive, practical resource for implementing preservation metadata in digital archiving systems; accompanying report (providing context, data model, assumptions); special topics, glossary, usage examples; set of XML schema which was developed to support use of the Data Dictionary. Version 2.0 of PREMIS was released in March 2008. Version 3.0 of PREMIS was released in June 2015.

Every digital object usually has metadata with descriptive information about the object connected to it. Digital library professionals however are all too aware that metadata for access and discovery is no longer enough. These professionals are looking to the future with an eye towards preservation, not only of the digital objects themselves but its metadata as well. Consider that certain file formats can become obsolete and not accessible by current applications. This would require either transforming older formats to new (migration), or reproducing the original experience with newer technology (emulation). Both strategies would require the following: technical metadata about the original files, the older hardware and software that they ran on, and what actions had been performed on them, all of which is preservation metadata. Preservation metadata therefore supports activities intended to ensure the long-term usability of a digital resource.

The PREMIS working group was created to further the work began by another initiative sponsored by the OCLC and the RLG: the Preservation Metadata Framework (PMF) working group. In 2001–2002 the PMF working group outlined the types of information that should be associated with an archived digital object. Their report, A Metadata Framework to Support the Preservation of Digital Objects (the Framework), proposed a list of prototype metadata elements. At this stage these proposed elements could not be implemented and additional work was needed. The PREMIS working group was asked to take the PMF group’s findings a step further and develop a data dictionary of core metadata for archived digital objects, as well as give guidance and suggest best practice for creating, managing, and using the metadata in preservation systems.

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