Long-term digital metadata curation
A. Shaon · 2006
The rapid increase in data volume and data availability along with the need for continual quality assured searching and indexing information of such data requires efficient and effective metadata management strategies. From this perspective, the necessity for adequate, well-managed and high quality Metadata is becoming increasingly essential for successful long-term high quality data preservation. Metadata's assistance in reconstruction or accessibility of preserved data, however, bears the same predicament as that of the efficient use of digital information over time: long-term metadata quality and integrity assurance notwithstanding the rapid evolvements of metadata formats and related technology. Therefore, in order to ascertain the overall quality and integrity of metadata over a sustained period of time, thereby assisting in successful long-term digital preservation, effective long-term metadata curation is indispensable. This paper presents an approach to long-term metadata curation, which involves a provisional specification of the core requirements of long-term metadata curation. In addition, the paper introduces “Metadata Curation Record”, expressed in the form of an XML Schema, which essentially captures additional statements about both data objects and associated metadata to aid long-term digital curation. The paper also presents a metadata schema mapping/migration tool, which may be regarded as a fundamental stride towards an efficient and curation-aware metadata migration strategy. 1.