This meeting will be devoted to the OAIS work that Bill Kehoe and Nancy McGovern are doing. Nancy and Bill will present an overview of preservation metadata issues that are driving and have emerged from CUL's Central Depository project. The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model metadata categories and related documents/initiatives will be central to the discussion. The overview will also reference relevant ongoing and planned initiatives at Cornell.

Nancy McGovern presented an overview of current Cornell activities, and then described the Central Depository Project in some detail. She is the Digital Preservation Officer (DPO), a new position in the newly-formulated Instruction, Research, and Information Services (IRIS) Division. The DPO coordinates digital preservation activities and policy development.

A central depository stores and manages digital objects that may contain multiple content files and/or metadata. It presents advantages for administration, for potential collaboration among institutions, and for users who can find material in one place. There are challenges in doing this, such as the need for standardization of format, the treatment of existing disparate files as well as new files, the enforcement of policies in a web environment, the preservation of the information over time, and the need for creative (and extensive) funding. Creating records for a central depository has been called the digital equivalent of retrospective conversion. Catalogers have figured out how to do retrospective conversion, whereas the procedures and standards for digital archives are still in the process of development. The Central Depository Project is a focal point for this work at Cornell.

hival information package), and DIP (dissemination information package). Digital archives include information not normally associated with paper files, having to do with the data's fixity, provenance, and use. Digital archives can track resources from the point of creation to how they are used and preserved over time.

Nancy talked about the OCLC-RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata, and reviewed the metadata sets recently proposed by that group for content information and for preservation description information. These two documents together provide the draft metadata set for the Archival Information Package. The WGPM is an international group, and their final document will be pivotal in the development of standards worldwide.