Update on the work of the PREMIS Editorial Committee

Karin Bredenberg, Marjolein Steeman, Tracy Meehleib are part of the PREMIS Editorial Committee

First of all, thank you for the feedback you have given us in response to last year's call to action! We also want to express our big thank you for the Brazilian Portuguese translation of “Understanding PREMIS” and the updates made to all of the other translations! We’ve been busy putting your feedback recommendations into effect and it’s fair to say that 2021 has been a very productive and--at the same time--a very strange year for the PREMIS Editorial Committee! We’ll start with the productive and end with the strange.

The Productive

The two main projects we have been working on this year: 1) transforming  the PREMIS Data Dictionary from a Word document into XML and  2) overhauling  the Rights section of the PREMIS Data Dictionary.

Reformatting the Data Dictionary

At the 2018 iPRES conference in Boston the community requested that the PREMIS Data Dictionary be reformatted to make it more usable -- it had only been available in pdf format at that point. In response, The PREMIS EC decided to transform it into TEI XML--reusing the work that has been done by the Technical Subcommittee on Encoded Archival Standards (TS EAS), their tag libraries, and their two output formats: a webpage and a PDF with some intelligence built in (like clickable keywords and a clickable table of contents). We will also be adding in some PREMIS Data Dictionary-specific modifications and enhancements that will benefit both the PREMIS community and the EAS community. This work is ongoing and will create a more conducive environment for future updates to the Data Dictionary, such as the planned update to the Rights section--once the PREMIS EC’s  Right work is completed, We believe the results of these efforts will be of great benefit to the community!

Data Dictionary Work, image by Karin Bredenberg

Overhauling the Rights Entity

Due to increasing attention regarding the documentation of rights over the past decade, the PREMIS EC created a Rights working group to investigate whether the Rights entity of the PREMIS data model was still meeting  the needs of the community. Originally the Rights entity was defined as the “assertion” of the rights basis to perform preservation actions. Usage has since broadened to documenting the right to perform access and re-use actions. Implicitly, this development has introduced more complexity which has in turn placed new demands on the data model. Furthermore, the concept of “obligations” has been proposed as an addition to the Rights model--for example, the obligation of the repository to perform certain preservation actions. Several use-cases have also drawn attention to the issue that the actual outcome of a request related to licensing or other restrictions needs documentation, and that such restrictions and outcomes can also be time-bound. How can our model reflect these issues without getting too complicated?

Having reached consensus on these abstract issues, the Rights working group plans to present its findings in a white paper. This publication will elaborate on these issues, offer examples, and discuss implications for the data model. We hope the paper will inspire  discussion and feedback from the community. We expect to publish this paper in spring of 2022.

The Strange

For members of the PREMIS EC, one of the saddest and strangest things about this year is not having one of our members with us any longer. We were all heartbroken when we got the news that Angela Dappert, one of our long time members, passed away in July. We posted the following statement of acknowledgement on the PREMIS web page in recognition of Angela’s important contributions to the standard; we would also like all of you to see the acknowledgement so we are reposting it here:

The PREMIS Editorial Committee would like to acknowledge the significant contribution that Angela Dappert has made to the preservation metadata standard. A PREMIS Editorial Committee member since 2007, Angela’s passion for digital preservation and metadata have contributed greatly to making PREMIS what it is today. Angela Dappert passed away in July 2021. She will be greatly missed by the preservation metadata community.

Work is ongoing with an award in her memory. The PREMIS EC will help inform the community about the award and the PREMIS EC will also be contributing to the award--to honor her memory! More information about the award will be available later this year so that you can participate in making the award a legacy that will benefit all people working or starting to work in the field of digital preservation.