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: METS subdivides metadata into four different subtypes: technical metadata providing information about the technical characteristics of a file and its format; IP rights metadata regarding the object or its components; source metadata, being descriptive or administrative metadata about an analog source from which the digital object derives; and digital provenance metadata, which documents the life-cycle of both the content and metadata comprising the digital object.

You can use any form of administrative metadata you want, you can have as many instances as you want, and it can reside inside or outside of the METS document, in either XML or binary form.

METS does not define its own administrative metadata formats, leaving that to other standards efforts.
This means that METS is extremely reliant on other standards efforts like PREMIS to provide the additional building blocks needed to record the complete set of metadata needed for a DL object.