title: Describing Digital Object Environments in PREMIS
creators: Angela Dappert Sebastien Peyrard Janet Delve Carol C.H. Chou
abstract: “Digital preservation metadata” is the information that is needed in order to preserve digital objects successfully in the longterm so that they can be deployed in some form in the future. A digital object is not usable without a computing environment in which it can be rendered or executed. Because of this, information that describes the sufficient components of the digital object’s computing environment has to be part of its preservation metadata. Although there are semantic units for recording environment information in PREMIS 2, these have rarely, if ever, been used. Prompted by increasing interest in the description of computing environments, this paper describes on-going efforts within the PREMIS data dictionary’s Editorial Committee to define an improved metadata description for them.
keywords: ischool toronto canada premis preservation metadata technical environments software preservation hardware preservation representation information representation information network conceptual modelling