Proceedings of JCDL 2007. Vancouver, BC, Canada. June 2007.

J.A. Smith and M.L. Nelson.

HTTP and MIME, while sufficient for contemporary web page access, do not provide enough forensic information to enable the long-term preservation of the resources they de- scribe and transport. But what if the originating web server automatically provided preservation metadata encapsulated with the resource at time of dissemination ? Perhaps the in- gestion process could be streamlined, with additional foren- sic metadata available to future information archeologists. We have adapted an Apache web server implementation of OAI-PMH which can utilize third-party metadata analysis tools to provide a metadata-rich description of each resource. The resource and its forensic metadata are packaged to- gether as a complex ob ject, expressed in plain ASCII and XML. The result is a CRATE: a self-contained preservation- ready version of the resource, created at time of dissemina- tion.

@INPROCEEDINGS{jas:jcdl07, author = {Joan A. Smith and Michael L. Nelson}, title = {Generating Best-Effort Preservation Metadata For Web Resources At Time of Dissemination}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries}, year = {2007}, month = {June}