Preservation of Metadata: A case study of a strategy to ensure technology agnostic metadata preservation

This paper focuses on strategies for preservation of metadata; one of the major topics in the creation of a new digital preservation strategy for the merged Royal Danish Library. Preservation of metadata is important to ensure preservation of all relevant information in order to be able to access digital objects in the future. This includes all kinds of metadata, which contributes to the understanding of an object, e.g. preservation metadata as well as descriptive metadata. The need for metadata is commonly accepted, but it is not as commonly accepted that metadata need to be preserved to the same extent as files. There are many challenges due to the fact that metadata are often updated. This is probably one of the reasons why there exist numerous examples of metadata being under backup only and not under bit preservation. Preservation of metadata is not just needed for future access of the objects, but also for re-establishment of repository systems after major breakdowns – or for establishment of a new repository as part of an exit strategy from a previous system. The latter case may also mean that the metadata have to be structured in a way, which can be used by different systems supporting digital preservation. This paper describes how the newly merged Royal Danish Library has created a digital preservation strategy to cope with these challenges, and discuss the background for choices made in this process.