Quality Requirements of Migration Metadata in Long-term Digital Preservation Systems

Migration is the most common preservation strategy in long-term digital preservation systems. It relays old digital objects from one technique to another. A prerequisite for a successful migration is the availability of migration metadata, which provide enough background information to preserved digital objects. Without the migration metadata, the migration may not be possible, but also the digital object’s consistency may be violated. It is therefore recognized that the migration metadata are essential but surprisingly no requirements on these migration metadata seem to be available. In this paper, quality requirements of such migration metadata are derived from common preservation metadata schemas. The completeness and the usefulness of these quality requirements are validated by a case study. The final results show that the quality requirements can actually improve the workflow of a migration procedure. In addition, they can be used to improve metadata schemas and thereby decrease the risks in future migrations. Finally, six improvement suggestions for preservation systems are derived from our analysis of the quality requirements.