The Australian METS Profile - A Journey about Metadata

In any journey, there's a destination but half the 'fun' is getting there. This article chronicles our journey towards a common way of packaging and exchanging digital content in a future Australian data commons – a national corpus of research resources that can be shared and re-used. Whatever packaging format is used, it has to handle complex content models and work across multiple submission and dissemination scenarios. It has to do this in a way that maintains a history of the chain of custody of objects over time. At the start of our journey we chose METS extended by PREMIS to do this. We learnt a lot during the first two stages that we want to share with those travelling to a similar destination. Introduction In December 2007 the National Library of Australia registered an Australian METS Profile [1] with the Library of Congress. This profile describes the rules and requirements for using the Metadata Exchange and Transmission Standard (METS) [2] to support the collection of and access to content in Australian digital repositories. A diagrammatic representation of the profile is given in Annex 1. Early in 2008 a sub-profile, the Australian METS Journal Profile [3], was also registered. This sub-profile inherits the generic profile and contains specific rules and requirements for journal publications. The aim of this article is to describe our journey towards a generic Australian METS profile that can be used across multiple domains and usage scenarios. It also describes how the main profile and the sub-profile work together and what additional profiling work is planned by the National Library of Australia and its partners to address the needs of the Australian repository community and (hopefully) of the international community as well.