Page 26 - Building Digital Libraries

Getting Started

supported. The tools introduced in this chapter are essentially documents
spanning hundreds of pages and saying that you need to be able to get
resources and descriptive, structural, and administrative metadata into and
out of the system reliably. If you can do those things, your repository can
survive inevitable technology cycles whether or not your repository supports
any particular model or standard.
Be aware that the tools presented here are predicated on assump-
tions geared towards the library’s interests in preserving information and
metadata. This must be a component of any sustainable repository, but it’s
important for this need to not overshadow the reason why the repository
is being created in the first place. Use gives repositories their value, so user
needs must take priority over the library’s operational concerns.
It is virtually impossible to be involved in digital archives and not come
in contact with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference
model, which has become ISO Standard 14721:2012. OAIS is relevant
because it is general enough to encompass almost any kind of archiving,
and it provides the conceptual framework for a growing number of digital
preservation efforts. As a conceptual model, OAIS does not address imple-
mentation details. OAIS is concerned primarily with preservation and does
not address the use cases that repositories are designed to address. Not all
systems can be made OAIS-compliant, and the importance of compliance
depends entirely on the purpose of the repository.
The Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) checklist, which is ISO Standard
16363, is used to audit and certify digital repositories. TDR is based on OAIS
and contains specific criteria that can be documented. Like OAIS, TDR con-
cerns itself with preservation and is not designed to accommodate use cases
surrounding specific types of materials. TDR is useful for documenting the
preservation capabilities of a repository or what those should be, but it offers
no guidance for selecting platforms for specific purposes.
The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard
(METS) uses the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to con-
tain the structure of digital objects and associated metadata.
PREMIS is a dictionary to support the long-term preservation
of digital objects. PREMIS allows you to describe who owns an
object, whether the digital object is authentic, what has been
done to preserve it, what you need to use it, and rights man-
agement information. The idea is that PREMIS metadata along
with descriptive metadata in a schema such as Dublin Core or
VRA Core can be put in a METS wrapper within an OAIS-com-
pliant repository that can be audited with TDR, DRAMBORA
(Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment),
or some other auditing tool, as figure 1.1 illustrates.
The preceding three paragraphs may look like alphabet
soup, but the tools and standards themselves are filled with
much less accessible jargon and acronyms that make reliably FIGURE 1.1
managing data and objects appear more complex than it is. It Preservation Standards Work Together

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