Report on the Meeting of Experts on Digital Preservation: Metadata Specifications

The following announcement is from the GPO web site.

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Report on the Meeting of Experts on Digital Preservation: Metadata Specifications. June 14, 2004 (PDF 140 KB)

Comments should be directed to Judith C. Russell ( jrussell@gpo.gov ) by Monday, March 28, 2005.

GPO is working with the library community on a national digitization plan, with the goal of digitizing a complete legacy collection of tangible U.S. Government publications. The objective is to ensure that the digital collection is available, in the public domain, for no-fee permanent public access through the FDLP.

The project will ensure that the collection is digitally reformatted for preservation purposes. The digital preservation masters and the associated metadata will be preserved in the GPO electronic archive (in addition to any other places that the materials might be held), and there will be no-fee public access to the content through derivative files on GPO Access.

The Report on the Meeting of Experts on Digital Preservation: Metadata Specifications is a summary of the second of two meetings held to assist GPO in developing specifications for the digitization project. This meeting, focusing on descriptive and preservation metadata, was held at GPO on June 14, 2004. A summary of the overall discussion of the experts and the necessary resources for the metadata package submission are included in the report. Also included is a listing of metadata elements that is not meant to be viewed as a final list of required metadata elements, but a list of metadata elements, based on this discussion and the recommended readings as put forth in the meeting. It provides a common set of elements from which to build for digitization project. GPO encourages all to review the report and provide comments to Judith C. Russell ( jrussell@gpo.gov) by Monday, March 28, 2005.

The first meeting of experts on digitization and digital preservation was held at the GPO in Washington, DC in March 2004. That meeting brought together practicing experts in the field of digital format conversion and digital project development to discuss the current standards and specifications for the creation of digital objects for preservation and to put forward a proposed set of minimum requirements for digitizing documents for this project. The Report of the Meeting of Experts on Digital Preservation: Digital Preservation Masters is located at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/about/reports/preservation.html.