Metadata for emulation

In the ‘Preliminary document analyzing and summarizing metadata standards and issues across Europe’ (Anderson, Delve et al, 2009) , several key, related issues were examined. This review concluded that it is sensible to follow a hybrid preservation approach in the short to medium term. Migration is currently the predominant preservation strategy and even ignoring any resistance to change, it would take some considerable time and change in practice before emulation could replace it. Next a variety of metadata standards were investigated with respect to their focus on particular preservation strategies. A key observation was that preservation standards such as PREMIS do exhibit a certain bias towards migration, even though they purport to be ‘implementation independent’ (Caplan & Guenther, 2005, pp. 111-112). Significant lacunae in existing standards were identified when it came to describing technical / environment metadata, which is vital for emulation but not for migration. The accompanying expectation by the standards’ creators that these standards would in time be extended was noted. Fortunately, some valuable work had been carried out previously, such as that done by the Cedars project , which does help to address some of the gaps uncovered.