Administrative Metadata for Long-Term Preservation and Management of Resources: A Survey of Current Practices in ARL Libraries

An institutional repository is, among other things, a means to preserve an organization's scholarly output or resources in a variety of digital media and across disciplines. Administrative metadata are critical to the preservation of these digital resources. This study, which surveyed fifty-four Association of Research Libraries (ARL) institutional repositories about their administrative metadata, was designed to create a snapshot of current metadata practices. It revealed no true consensus of administrative metadata accommodated and collected by the repositories. Moreover, responses throughout the survey indicate that in general, organizations are neither accommodating nor recording administrative metadata to any significant extent. If research libraries are to provide permanent, organized, and secure repositories for institutional scholarship and special collections, they must identify core metadata in the context of repository objectives, explore barriers to collection of administrative metadata, and strategize as to how those barriers might be mitigated or overcome. ********** An institutional repository is a central digital repository for an organization's scholarly output across media and disciplines. It is organized and secure, and the digital objects (scholarly resources) it houses are intended to be permanently preserved. A scan of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) repository websites shows that many libraries make explicit this "preservation promise" to depositors and other users. Administrative metadata, which describes the technical characteristics of the digital file and any original physical source object, preservation actions, and relevant intellectual property rights and access permissions, is critical to the preservation of digital resources. (1) Ten years ago, early in the development of institutional repositories, lack of preservation and administrative metadata was cited as the biggest obstacle to successful long-term preservation. (2) Six years ago, the Audit & Certification Criteria and Checklist developed by the Research Libraries Group-National Archives and Records Administration (RLG-NARA) Task Force on Digital Repository Certification addressed metadata again, and suggested "preservation metadata is best addressed by members of the designated communities." (3) These communities have responded to the call by developing numerous standards to support the preservation and management of digital objects. A review of these standards reveals that administrative metadata are detailed and voluminous, and for good reason. Most librarians and archivists would agree that the more information that is known about a resource, the more effectively it can be managed and preserved. Unfortunately, the gathering, recording, and management of detailed metadata is expensive; indeed, a 2002 report by RLG stated that creation of detailed technical metadata alone was possibly beyond the human resources of most institutions. (4) Ten years later, this is still the case. To further complicate matters, the array of standards, best practices, and models fail to form a cohesive whole. As if the sheer volume of detailed administrative metadata were not daunting enough, the overlap and gaps between the related standards make them difficult to implement within any repository system. There are preservation metadata standards meant to apply to all formats but which lack the specificity needed for any one. (5) There are technical metadata standards intended for a specific format but which lack corresponding metadata for the original (usually analog) source material. (6) Those technical metadata standards that do include source metadata are often only applicable to one format. (7) Moreover, boundaries between metadata types are not clearly delineated. Some preservation standards include rights metadata, (8) but some do not. Finally, there are standards that were not designed to record detailed administrative metadata, but which have nonetheless been extensively used for this purpose. …