Digital Curation: A How-To-Do-It Manual

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Chapter 6: Description and Representation Information

Chapter 6 notes Description and Representation Information, one of the DCC Curation Lifecycle's four Full Lifecycle Actions. Description and Representation Information activities are ongoing throughout the curation lifecycle and comprise assigning administrative, descriptive, technical, structural and preservation metadata; and assigning representation information; both according to standards.

6.1 Checklists

• 6.1.1 Documenting Data: Checklist

  (Based on: University of Edinburgh. 2009. Data Documentation & Metadata
  www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/information-services/services/research-support/data-library/research-data-mgmt/data-mgmt/data-documentation)

  • Ensure that all data generated or collected through the course of your research are documented
  • Identify documentation and metadata requirements at the start of data creation, such as:
  • Calibration and other details of instrumentation
  • Lab notebooks
  • Methodology reports
  • Codebooks with full variable and value labels
  • Decisions about software
  • Changes to different versions of the dataset
  • Assumptions made during analysis
  • Create a "readme.txt" file to describe the contents of files in a folder

• 6.1.2 Description Information Required for Curation: Checklist

• Descriptive metadata
  • Name of creator of data set
  • Name of author of document
  • Title of document
  • File name
  • Location of file
  • Size of file
• Structural metadata
  • File relationships
• Technical metadata
  • Format
  • Compression or encoding algorithms
  • Encryption and decryption keys
  • Software (including release number) used to create or update the data
  • Hardware on which the data were created
  • Operating systems in which the data were created
  • Application software in which the data were created
• Administrative metadata
  • Information about data creation (e.g. date)
  • Information about subsequent updates, transformation, versioning, summarization
  • Descriptions of migration and replication
  • Information about other events that have affected the files
• Preservation metadata
  • File format
  • Significant properties
  • Technical environment
  • Fixity information

6.2 Templates

6.3 Links

• 6.3.1 Technical Metadata Specific to Object Types

  Paradigm Project. 2008. Preservation Metadata: Metadata Specific to Object Types
  www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/metadata/preservation-types.html

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