Standards Development

Scope

There is a well-recognized need to capture digital information associated with a great variety of endeavours in virtually all areas of society. However, it is widely recognized that many such endeavours are not able, for one reason or another, to leave a sufficient legacy of information so others can reuse and fully leverage the effort that has gone into the endeavour. The purpose of this Recommended Practice is to provide guidance for projects about the metadata (the term Additional Information is used below because the term ‘metadata’ is too unspecific and its use can cause confusion) that needs to be captured and/or generated and retained in order to ensure that the information created by the project, either as part of its main objectives or as a by-product of achieving those objectives, can be exploited over the short, medium, and long term.

This Recommended Practice deals with the aspects of a project, in particular the terminology used.  Many of these terms are already used with various definitions within the target communities for this practice, for example, space, science, life sciences, libraries, records management, and archival communities. It is expected that other communities can easily map this terminology to the terminology used within those communities. The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) provided a starting point and inputs from a variety of other sources were used to arrive at the terms used within this standard.

This Recommended Practice accomplishes the following:

–        identifies the Additional Information to be collected or improved at various points;

–        forms a basis for the specification of Data Management Plans (DMPs);

–        forms a basis for the identification and/or development of additional standards and implementation guides, including those that address particular concerns in more detail.