Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln

 

Date of this Version

Winter 2-26-2014

Abstract

In a time where websites are ever changing, what metadata standards and tools are best for ensuring that web archive objects (such as snapshots of websites) are readable for users of the future? Can the evolution of web interfaces be documented? Initiatives that explore these questions already exist such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (which stores source code from websites along with images); however, other archive building solutions are also available but have yet to be explored. The field of digital asset management (DAM), for example, has long examined how assets (digital files) are stored, organized, retrieved, and preserved. Best practices related to the use of metadata standards and tools found in digital asset management are useful and relevant to web archive building. In order to better understand the practicality of implementing DAM best practices in building a web archive, a small project was performed which involved cross-walking two metadata standards, Adobe’s eXtensible Metadata Platform (XMP) and PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS), and recording metadata related to snapshots of a website, the Perseus Digital Library, over a span of over a decade. The findings of this project showed that it is impossible, at least in part, to encode PREMIS within XMP.

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