A Study on the Meta-data Design for Long-Term Digital Multimedia Preservation

Due to the fast growth of multimedia content, the digital preservation emerges as an important technology that prolongs the life of digital objects. For audio-visual contents, we face the obsolescence problem in both supporting hardware/software and data representation formats. Migration strategy is a solution for achieving high-quality archival and easy access. In this paper, we investigate the concepts and structures in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and the MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) specifications. By addressing the issues for a long-term audio-visual preservation system, we propose a combined meta-data scheme to record both the management and technical procedures and parameters. The detailed meta-data that keep the history of evolution versions can be used for subsequent migrations. We also implement a prototype system to realize our design. At the end of this study, we identify additional issues for future improvements.