Administrative Metadata for Long-Term Preservation and Management of Resources

Abstract

An institutional repository is, among other things, a means to preserve an organization’s scholarly output or resources in a variety of digital media and across disciplines. Administrative metadata are critical to the preservation of these digital resources. This study, which surveyed fifty-four Association of Research Libraries (ARL) institutional repositories about their administrative metadata, was designed to create a snapshot of current metadata practices. It revealed no true consensus of administrative metadata accommodated and collected by the repositories. Moreover, responses throughout the survey indicate that in general, organizations are neither accommodating nor recording administrative metadata to any significant extent. If research libraries are to provide permanent, organized, and secure repositories for institutional scholarship and special collections, they must identify core metadata in the context of repository objectives, explore barriers to collection of administrative metadata, and strategize as to how those barriers might be mitigated or overcome.