Karin Bredenberg is Chair of the PREMIS Editorial Committee and she works for Riksarkivet/Swedish National Archives
It’s been a very productive year for the PREMIS Editorial Committee!
We’ve brought several projects to fruition and embarked on a number of new efforts since our last WDPD report on PREMIS and Linked Data. As you probably know, we released version 3.0 of the PREMIS Data Dictionary in 2015 and since then we’ve devoted a lot of our resources towards modelling and completing an OWL ontology, creating supporting documentation for the new ontology, and updating the related preservation vocabularies on LC’s Linked Data Service. We are proud to say these are all available now!
In addition, we completed a survey on the Impact of PREMIS this year. This survey was administered by the PREMIS Editorial Committee to better understand the current impact of PREMIS. Since the release of the original PREMIS Data Dictionary in 2005, there has not been a formal poll of users. The last official survey related to PREMIS was conducted in 2003, resulting in the report Implementing Preservation Repositories for Digital Materials: Current Practice and Emerging Trends in the Cultural Heritage Community, which greatly informed the original Data Dictionary. Thirteen years after the release of the standard, the Editorial Committee agreed that it was an important time to step back and find out what we can learn from those who work with PREMIS, as well as from those who do not.
The specific goals of this survey were to help the committee understand:
- PREMIS's reach across professions, sectors, and geographies
- The size and variety of collections that leverage PREMIS
- How PREMIS is used in relation to other standards/schemas
- Whether people find limitations with the PREMIS model, schema vocabularies, or documentation
- How technologies have adopted PREMIS
By learning more about the user community, we hope to be able to perform more targeted outreach, to gain input for future versions of PREMIS, and to improve the available resources.
We also held a PREMIS Pop-Up with presentations in conjunction with iPRES2018 in Boston. Several members of the EC gave papers in sessions at the conference, and our PREMIS Pop-Up included an overview of the EC’s work and survey results. The EC’s PREMIS OWL Ontology subgroup got the award for best short paper, and other PREMIS EC members received awards for best poster and for best long paper. Congrats!
Our Data Dictionary subgroup finished researching and testing reformatting options for the PREMIS Data Dictionary. The PREMIS Data is a comprehensive, practical resource for implementing preservation metadata in digital preservation systems. Currently it is only available on pdf format; it will be reformatted and made available in an interactive format in 2019.
Other efforts to increase our outreach to and support for PREMIS in the digital preservation community include
- Improving membership procedures so that non-EC members can more easily participate in and contribute to EC activities
- Making EC work more transparent and more easily accessible and understandable to the preservation community
- Reevaluating/updating the Implementation Registry
- Reformatting our wiki so EC meeting agendas, notes, and other resources are available to the public
- Creating a more effective communication plan—you should be seeing and hearing from us more frequently
Get Involved
- Subscribers to the PREMIS Implementers’ Group (PIG) include 379 members from 24 different countries—please join our community!
- Use #PREMIS on Twitter and other social media
- Email the Editorial Committee directly at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
- We would love to hear you feedback and comments on all things PREMIS
PREMIS Editorial Committee members Rebecca Guenther, Angela Di Iorio, Evelyn McLellan, and Bertrand Caron, receive the short paper award at #ipres2018 in Boston, MA.
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