Building a sustainable metadata workflow for audio-visual resources: University of Illinois Library’s Medusa Digital Preservation Repository

When the University of Illinois Library began development of its digital preservation repository system, Medusa, the library found that there were many audio-visual resources that had yet to be cataloged, i.e. inaccessible to users. In order to make resources available to end-users and comply with Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model, the library developed an ingestion package that includes descriptive metadata. The Preservation program’s OAIS Modeling for Media Files Working Group carefully examined the currently available best practice documents and recommendations for the cataloging of audio-visual resources to draft levels of compliance for audio Submission Information Packages (SIPs) and descriptive metadata. The paper introduces the detailed decision process for the Library’s descriptive metadata standard and element set included within audio SIPs along with their designated file formats, file specifications, and directory structures. The paper also discusses the element-by-element comparison between PBCore and MODS, and the XML-based descriptive metadata creation workflow as it was applied in a recent pilot project.