Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Pre-DLF: PREMIS tutorial
The DLF conference hasn't opened yet, but today there was a tutorial in PREMIS at Harvard, continuing through tomorrow morning. This was the first public PREMIS tutorial in the Americas.
PREMIS, a somewhat strained acronym for "Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies," is the name of a working group and a data model. It's intended to go with digital archives, holding information about the archiving of objects in a digital repository. It's contrasted with, among other things, descriptive metadata; it's about the storage, legitimacy, and integrity of digital objects rather than their content. This is fairly new; the PREMIS final report was released in May of 2005.
The presenters made it clear that PREMIS is a data model rather than a particular implementation, though tomorrow we'll be hearing about an XML schema to represent it.
PREMIS is very solid on some things, such as events; it provides a rich data model for tracking the ingest, validation, and modification of archival objects. Other features need more work; the "rights" definitions currently cover only grants of permission and don't even include a way to express copyright status. (Work is continuing in this area.)
I was quite pleased to hear JHOVE come up repeatedly in the discussion. It was mentioned that file format metadata standards (see, there is a connection between this post and the nominal subject of the blog!) are still few and far between. There are NISO metadata for images and AES metadata for audio, but the gaps remain larger than the standards. Each file format class has different needs, so the general problem is messy.
PREMIS allows lots of different ways to do things; I'm still trying to get a sense of whether this will be a problem when communicating preservation metadata.
A couple of useful URLs:
- Implementation registry
- Premis Implementors' Group (PIG): Wiki, mailing list, and other stuff
