Provision of digital preservation metadata: a role for ONIX?

Preserving the vast amount of digitally published data is of paramount importance to maintaining the intellectual heritage. In order that resources can be deposited, managed and retrieved, it will be necessary to accurately describe what has been preserved and how it has been preserved. This paper looks at the problems of producing accurate and effective metadata that describe preserved resources without incurring a prohibitive cost overhead. It investigates the extent to which existing metadata standards may be able to address this problem and specifically analyses whether ONIX metadata could be integrated into the preservation process.