Metadata Report Now on GPO Access

The  Report on the Meeting of Experts on Digital Preservation: Metadata Specifications is available on GPO Access. The Report was originally posted for comments until Monday, March 28, 2005, but because of the limited number of comments received, the deadline for comments has been extended until Friday, April 29, 2005. GPO encourages all to review this important report and provide comments to Judith C. Russell.

Background:

GPO is working with the library community and others in the information 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.