National Standards Organization 
Invitational Meeting on Technical Metadata Elements for Image Files

A One and half day Invitational Meeting
Dates: April 18 and 19, 1999
Venue: Washington, DC
Attendance will be limited to 40-50

link to Official Meeting Website

What this meeting is about

Libraries, academic institutions, archives, museums, historical societies, local/state governments and private industry are increasingly engaging in document and image conversion activities and preservation projects that result in the creation of digital images depicting textual, visual, and artifact collections. There is, however, little consistency in the metadata that accompanies these images. Other activities have focused on descriptive or intellectual metadata, but there are relatively few efforts addressing the types of information, sometimes included in the categories of structural and administrative metadata, which describe aspects of the capture process and certain technical characteristics of the digital images. The consistent recording of such information, whether in file headers or in separate associated files, will be critical to ensure that image files are and remain usable and will require the development of specialized software and tools.

This invitational meeting will concentrate on defining the range of technical information needed to manage and use digital still images that reproduce a variety of pictures, documents and artifacts. Although the emphasis will be on raster images produced by scanning, the group will consider issues pertaining to other similar types of digital images, such as newly created digital photographs.

The goal of the meeting is to define a reasonably comprehensive set of metadata elements and to reach consensus on a subset that ought to be required in the documentation of digital images. An additional goal is to reach consensus about how best to structure and format the metadata, including a determination of which elements belong in image headers and which might best be kept external to the image files themselves. The findings of this meeting will be communicated to librarians, museum and archive specialists, and digital imaging professionals in order to receive their comments and advice.

The organizers of this meeting recognize that this meeting will not cover all types of metadata that may be useful in managing image files and image collections. One area specifically left for the future is the full set of metadata needed to describe the structural or hierarchical relationships among sets or groups of image files. In addition, although some of the metadata defined at this meeting will support the transformation of image files for migration, preservation, and access purposes, a comprehensive examination of this requirement will await another discussion. The organizers hope that focused action in this meeting on a subset of technical metadata will facilitate the development of standard uses of those metadata and open paths for similar detailed treatment of other related metadata.

Documents to Read

• Making of America II White Paper (see especially sections on Administrative Metadata and Structural Metadata)
• RLG Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata May 1998 Final Report

Other Resources and Links

• CNI/OCLC Image Metadata Conference announcement page and report by Stu Weibel in the Jan 1997 issue of D-Lib Magazine

• Howard's Metadata and Standards links
• Harvard's Visual Information Access (VIA) page
• Donald P. D'Amato, Ph.D. et al. Requirements and Options for the Digitization of the Illustration Collections of the National Museum of Natural History
• "Don't I Already Have that Image?" Issues in Equivalency of Digital Images by Howard Besser and John Weise
• Dublin Core Main Homepage
• Dublin Core Relation_Type Working Group
• Very old document by Howard Besser concerning Standards for Images (an effort that was coordinated by both the Coalition for Networked Information and the Computerized Interchange of Museum Information), also done as a CNI session.
• TIFF specifications
• Basic Image Interchange Format (BIIF) (older write-up), developed by the US Dept of Defense's National Imagery Transmission Format Standard (NITFS), and now submitted to the International Standard Organization's ISO/IEC JTC1/SC24 (Computer Graphics and Image Processing) as Part 5 of the International Standard for Image Processing and Interchange (IPI) (ISO 12087)
• WGBH's proposed Universal Preservation Format
• Time & Bits: Managing Digital Continuity Conference Background Paper by Peter Lyman and Howard Besser
• RLG Preservation Working Group on Digital Archiving, 5/97 Progress Report
• Issues & Innovations in Preserving Digital Information, Association of Research Libraries' Transforming Libraries, Issue #5, 1998
• Working Group on Archiving and Distribution of the Imaging and Graphics Business Team (IGBT) of ISO/IEC JTC 1
• Amico data specifications
• Proposed Enhancements to MARC 007 Values for Computer Files by RLG's Working Group on Preservation and Reformatting Information
• NSF Workshop on Data Archiving and Information Preservation
• WGBH Educational Foundation Universal Preservation Format
• Hedstrom, Margaret and Sheon Montgomery. Digital Pre servation Needs and Requirements in RLG Member Institutions, 1998.
• Arts and Humanities Data Service, Strategic Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Collections, July 1998
• Rothenberg, Jeff. Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technical Foundation for Digital Preservation, Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, January 1999
• National Standards Organization Invitational Meeting on Technical Metadata Elements for Image Files, April 18-19, 1999, Washington DC (sponsored by the National Information Standards Organization and the Digital Library Federation)
• Imaging Science & Technology conference

Framing some of the Issues

• Sample groupings of metadata elements  (Howard 1/2/99)

 

Meeting and Schedule

• meeting tentatively scheduled for Washington DC for Sunday afternoon April 18 and all day Monday April 19
• very tentative meeting format
• very tentative list of meeting invitees
• Breakout Sessions
• Characteristics and Features of Images (Steve Puglia session leader)
• Features or aspects of images typically recorded in headers or filename extensions, such as MIME type, spatial and tonal resolution, color space, references to color management information, orientation, compression, dimensions, special viewer or printer requirements.
• Image Production and Reformatting Features (Stephen Chapman session leader)
• Features describing the provenance of the image, particularly features of the imaging system that generated it, including information about the agent authorizing the production of the image, the make and model of the equipment used, targets or reference to targets used, the calibration of the system, and measures of its capacities in terms of resolution, density, and means of color encoding.
• Image identification and integrity (John Weise session leader)
• Name, maker/manager identification, dates made or modified, checksum or other file integrity device, external references, e.g., to intellectual metadata.
• The groups will be tasked to define the range of metadata that could be collected for these areas and to come to a group consensus on a subset of mandatory metadata elements. Each Group will also examine issues such as which elements belong in a header and which ones might reside in an associated metadata file, the best possible syntax for such a file, and authoritative vocabularies that might be used as values of metadata elements.

Compiled by Howard Besser