Preservation Metadata: Another Chapter in the Metadata Story

In considering the long-term however, needs change as local 'use' shifts to 'reuse' by those outside the local community and data are moved into other long-term repositories. As data get further away from their source both in time and location, new data representation and maintenance needs arise. From a broad data archival perspective, description of data handling at the local repository level is just as important as the initial description of the original data acquisition. This type of information is called 'preservation metadata' (as opposed to 'descriptive', 'technical', 'administrative' or 'discovery' metadata) within the library science community; preservation metadata is defined as information needed to preserve digital objects. This metadata describes the data as an object in any form (e.g. a file or a database), and includes such information as the date of upload to a system, who completed the uploading, what format and content changes occurred either at the time of upload or subsequently, who is responsible for the changes and so forth. Preservation metadata maintains the authenticity and integrity of the data over the long-term through documenting changes occurring subsequent to the original data acquisition.