Newsline: News You Can Use
Publication of the Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonweal th Agencies
The Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies is now available on the National Archives of Australia Website at:
URL: <http://www.naa.gov.au/govserv/techpub/rkms/intro.htm>
This standard describes the metadata that the National Archives of Australia recommends should be captured in the recordkeeping systems used by Commonwealth government agencies.
Compliance with the Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies will help agencies to identify, authenticate, describe and manage their electronic records in a systematic and consistent way to meet business, accountability and archival requirements. The standard is designed to be used as a reference tool by agency corporate managers, IT personnel and software vendors involved in the design, selection and implementation of electronic recordkeeping and related information management systems. It defines a basic set of 20 metadata elements (eight of which constitute a core set of mandatory metadata) and 65 sub-elements that may be incorporated within such systems, and explains how they should be applied within the Commonwealth sphere.
Adrian Cunningham
Director, Recordkeeping and Descriptive Standards
National Archives of Australia
SOURCE: Aus-Archivists, AGLS Working Group, metadata-l mailing lists
DraftOpen eBook 1.0 Specification includes Dublin Core Metadata
Draft Open eBook 1.0 Specification, Version 0.9b, May 24, 1999
The recommendation can be found at:
URL: <http://www.openebook.org/>
The draft recommendation for the Open Ebook Standard, released May 24, 1999, includes Dublin Core as the metadata standard for ebooks. Open eBook Initiative supporters include Microsoft, Adobe, Bertelsmann, WarnerBooks, HarperCollins, the Association of American Publishers, and NIST. The metadata reference can be found in section two of the standard.
Scoping the Future of Oxford’s Digital Collections
Readers of Ariadne may be interested in a project currently underway at the University of Oxford. The project is entitled ‘Scoping the Future of Oxford’s Digital Collections’ and has been funded by the A W Mellon Foundation. It’s completion date is the end of July 1999. The study is being conducted by Stuart Lee, seconded from the Humanities Computing Unit at the University Computing Services.
The report aims:
- to document, analyse and evaluate Oxford’s current digitization activities, as a basis for assessing the effectiveness of the various methodologies used;
- to investigate the possibilities for building on the existing project-based work and for migrating it into viable services for library users;
- to develop appropriate selection criteria for creating digital collections in the context of local, national, and international scholarly requirements for digital library products and services;
- to make recommendations for further investment and activity within the Oxford libraries sector and potentially within the UK research libraries community.
The study will be expected to deliver two outcomes:
- it will identify specific tasks for phased funding and further development;
- it will provide the University with an integrated set of practical and achievable objectives, amounting to a strategic plan for future investment in the digitization of its library collections.
To date the study has produced an article on ‘Assessing Collections for Digitization’ and has performed in-depth interviews with digitization projects both within Oxford and external to it. In the near future the project will be mounting a series a decision matrices, workflows, and a study of the issues currently surrounding digitization.
Further issues of Ariadne will include more details of the project. In the meantime readers should point their browsers to
URL: <http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/scoping/>
or e-mail Stuart.Lee@oucs.ox.ac.uk.