Generating best-effort preservation metadata for web resources at time of dissemination

Authors:
Joan A. Smith;Michael L. Nelson
Affiliations:
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA;Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
Year:
2007

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Abstract

HTTP and MIME, while sufficient for contemporary webpage access, do not provide enough forensic information to enable the long-term preservation of the resources they describe and transport. But what if the originating web server automatically provided preservation metadata encapsulated with the resource at time of dissemination? Perhaps the ingestion process could be streamlined, with additional forensic metadata available to future information archeologists. We have adapted an Apache web server implementation of OAI-PMH which can utilize third-party metadata analysis tools to provide a metadata-rich description of each resource. The resource and its forensic metadata are packaged together as a complex object, expressed in plain ASCII and XML. The result is a CRATE: a self-contained preservation-ready version of the resource, created at time of dissemination.