RE: Proposed text for provenance section

Does the text below address people's concerns with the section describing provenance in a library context?

The library (or rather the cultural heritage -- museums and archives) community uses the term `provenance' to mean the record of ownership of the primary object rather than the metadata.

Largely, at the present time no one who actually manages archives expects to track changes to descriptive metadata over time.  In traditional library/information management systems logs are kept around to track metadata changes temporarily, but it's just not considered important to the core mission of managing the \emph{content} over time.  Schemas change, contexts change, resources get described in myriad ways (all at the same time), people make mistakes, fix them, we add stuff, we remove stuff, and libraries do not track all this.

However there are some newer kinds of metadata for which the community do seem to want to track provenance; namely, preservation metadata, i.e. capturing and preserving provenance metadata related to preservation activities -- i.e. what was done to the digital object over time in order to preserve it.  This is somewhat an unknown area, since it is difficult to predict if something will be useful in practice, when it has never previously been available and thus does not match existing or traditional practice.

Below are some example queries that an archivist might want to perform on a digital archive's provenance metadata:

\begin{itemize}
\item For every item that has a bitstream of type $x$, when was that bitstream last modified?
\item List all transformative modifications of a particular bitstream (or all the bitstreams for an item) since its original ingestion.
\item Has a modification of type $x$ (e.g. a particular preservation format migration) ever been done on the bitstreams of a particular item (gets at authenticity)
\item Show all the items submitted by William Mitchell to a given collection (as opposed to authored by him).
\item Find all the items that have been withdrawn from collection $x$ since March 1, 2003 by Lyndon Johnson.
\end{itemize}

 Robert Tansley / Hewlett-Packard Laboratories / (+1) 617 551 7624

Received on Friday, 11 July 2003 10:00:34 UTC