Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Administrative and preservation metadata > Introduction
Introduction
During the course of its lifecycle, a single digital archival object requires an extensive amount of associated metadata, so that it can be managed and preserved effectively by the repository, and understood and accessed by the researcher. There are three broad categories of metadata:
- Descriptive metadata: information about the intellectual content of a digital object, which is used to aid identification and discovery of the object by the researcher.
- Structural metadata: information about the relationships between digital objects, which can be very complex in a large hybrid personal archive. Structural metadata also supports the display and navigation of digital objects by users.
- Administrative metadata: information needed by the repository for the long-term management of a digital object, including information about an object’s creation, technical information such as file formats, provenance information and information about intellectual property rights.
This chapter of the Workbook is primarly concerned with the metadata that must be recorded for administrative and preservation purposes, though it touches on descriptive metadata where this is relevant, and a single piece of metadata may, of course, fulfil several functions. The following metadata areas are introduced and their application to the context of hybrid or digital personal archives is explored:
