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Updated readme.txt, corrected FIDO version and minor changes to fido.py
Dark Matter
Back in the 1970s, there was some concern that radiation from “visual display units” might be damaging to health. Australian trade unionists at the time grabbed on to this as a negotiating point, and one went so far as to demand publicly that no radiation at all should be allowed from VDUs, in any part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. Apart from the sheer physical impossibility of such an object (even a disconnected VDU lost in the cold of inter-stellar space would radiate a small amount), the uselessness of an invisible visual display unit should have been obvious!
Forward to today, and there is some concern amongst publishers that legal deposit of non-print material might hurt their markets, and hence damage their profits. One response[1] has a similarly delightful idea of how their markets might be protected: “Any access must be limited to a single simultaneous access in any one of the legal deposit libraries. In other words, either access is provided via a stand-alone terminal from which no copying is technically possible, or access is limited to a print copy with no reproduction facilities in the reading room in question”[2].
Back to my invisible VDU… in the intervening years, physicists have discovered a rather large gap in some of their theories. To make things consistent again, some have postulated that most of the universe is filled with “dark matter”, which comprises the large part of the mass of the universe, but is otherwise un-detectable. They have even suggested a name for the particles comprising this dark matter: weakly-interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Despite their best efforts (and those of elderly Australian trade unionists, no doubt), they have yet to find any solid evidence (sorry) for this stuff.
Fast forward to the near future, when the best dreams of the publishing industry have been realised in the legal deposit regulations. Imagine the British Library Legal Deposit Reading Room. Encased with a Faraday cage to prevent radiation escape (for publishers are also deeply worried about security), a small windowless room is entered via an antechamber where researchers are examined closely through more powerful versions of those X-ray scanners that so worry some travellers in displaying their nakedness alongside some possible hidden pens or paper. Perhaps a stripsearch will be necessary. Admitted to the Reading Room, you find a single VDU and keyboard, that allows you to search for, and feast your eyes on this precious legal deposit material. After reading feverishly for as long as your brain can accurately retain the material, you rush from the room into an external area, where your laptop awaits your trembling fingers, desperate to accurately transcribe the passage you noted. Alas, the person two before you in the queue has relieved you of that possibility, and your laptop into the bargain.
I sincerely hope that Her Majesty’s Civil Servants are not such wimps as to fall for this claptrap. If I had my way, they would refuse to consider any other aspects of any response that contained such ideas. Let us hope there are no wimps in DCMS.
[1] http://t.co/dPfOrmEu
[2] Ironically, the public servants who archived this response did so in such a way that no copying was technically possible, so I had to re-type the short quotation above, switching between Acrobat Read and my word processing program to do so. Any errors or omissions in the above are theirs, of course.
NHPRC Grants Relating to Digital Preservation
The following is a guest post by Barrie Howard, Program Management Coordinator, NDIIPP.
This post is the third in a short series about U.S. government grant programs that have funded digital preservation since the beginning of the new millennium. This series focuses on federal agencies other than The Library of Congress, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Today’s post is about the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and some exemplary work supported by that agency.
NHPRC— an independent entity affiliated with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration—has contributed $5 million to the field of digital preservation since 2000 through its Electronic Records Projects program. Over 20 projects have received funding to develop best practices, infrastructure and tools. NHPRC shares a strength with NDIIPP in that it has funded the work of organizations in all sectors, i.e., government, nonprofit and private. NHPRC has been at the vanguard of supporting digital preservation projects led by state government departments, such as the 2001 Electronic Records Training and Awareness Program awarded to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.
That same year, NHPRC began supporting the first phase of the State University of New York’s US-InterPARES Project, which coordinated the U.S. part of an international initiative. The project outcomes established standards for maintaining the authenticity of electronic records selected for long-term preservation and use past their active lifecycle. In addition to the international reach of this project, the collaboration included organizations from across sectors. NHPRC went on to fund two more phases of the domestic InterPARES work.
Another state university project worth mentioning is the Michigan State University H-Net Archive , which focused on developing processes and tools for preserving and providing continued access to archives of electronic mailing lists, popularly known as listservs. The H-Net archive includes topical discussion lists in the arts, humanities, and social sciences important to supporting teaching and learning at Michigan State.
The MetaArchive Cooperative, which has also been supported by NDIIPP, was funded by NHPRC in 2008 to develop a cost model for a range of preservation services built on top of LOCKSS technology. MetaArchive is a distributed digital preservation network created for cultural memory organizations to manage their own digital content instead of farming out the work to a third-party vendor. Founded in 2002, the organization has been successful in providing stable, trustworthy services to its membership, and has continued to grow participation exponentially, even in tough economic times.
NHPRC continues to fund valuable research in the library and archive communities, and is currently accepting grant applications for Electronic Records Projects.
How can your organization benefit from support from this funding opportunity?
Audit and Certification of repositories comes of age
After many years of steady, patient, work, the standard for Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories has been published. It is available free of charge from CCSDS 652.0-M-1, and will, in a short while, be available on the ISO site as ISO 16363 – for a fee.
It derives from the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) which is also available from the CCSDS site as well as ISO. The updated version of OAIS is finally being published.
An update on ISO 16363, its sister standard 16919, and OAIS (ISO 14721), will be given at the APA conference in London, 8 -9 November.
These standards launch a new age for digital preservation – allowing there to be a third party ISO audits of repositories so that we can know whether or not they deserve to be described as Trustworthy.
I Love This Meeting: Preservation Storage, in All its Glory
One of our annual highlights is The Storage Meeting, which brings together digital preservation practitioners and data storage vendors to have an open discussion. We held this year’s meeting, Designing Storage Architectures for Preservation Collections, during September 26-27, in Washington DC.
Over 100 archivists and librarians, computer scientists, IT professionals and storage vendors participated. This included people in the trenches who manage digital collections and run IT infrastructures, researchers and engineers experimenting with new technologies and managers and executives.
I love this meeting.
It’s a rare opportunity for preservation professionals to have an open conversation with IT staff and vendors about what they are trying to accomplish, for vendors and researchers to present new trends and for everyone to see just how close or far apart we are in meeting our needs.
Trevor Owens and Cory Snavely presenting for the NDSA Infrastructure Working Group. Photo by Leslie Johnston.
Presentation topics included issues faced by a number of large digital collections, outcomes of surveys in preservation storage use, economic models for analysis of preservation storage infrastructure expenditures, the current state of solid-state and flash storage, tools for the management of storage infrastructure, use of cloud storage and reducing power usage.
The two buzzwords for this meeting were: “faster” and “migration.”
Every collecting institution in the room had some sort of migration going on, be it networking, hardware, software, media file formats, or metadata. The assumption was that this would be an ongoing effort for all of us, rather like the story about painting the Golden Gate Bridge – that every time they finish, it’s time to start again. (Note that they don’t really continuously paint it end-to-end; I looked it up).
It’s expensive to constantly update our infrastructures, but the need to reduce power consumption, increase storage capacity in fixed-space data centers, and outpace the growth of our digital collections is vital.
Also vital is to improve the speed at which we move files between and within our institutions, and to improve the ability to provide access to increasingly large collections. It was not uncommon at this meeting to hear about multi-petabyte video and audio collections, 250 terabyte web archives, collections of millions of digitized books and billions of tweets. Cultural heritage institutions have entered the realm of “big data,” and service models that once supported near-instantaneous querying and transferring of files for research use are now being revised to include the possibility of hours for queries and days for transfers. Many of the presentations focused on denser storage for larger collections, faster write and seek times and faster processing. The catch is that many opined that network infrastructure may be the one area that has lagged in this era of large files and collections.
Notes and slides from the meeting will be put on digitalpreservation.gov by the end of the first week in October. In-depth reports will also be made available about some of the presentations on this blog in the very near future. Stay tuned!
Unconferences: Unique and Unbound
Back in the early 1970’s when I was just a wee lad, I was smitten with television commercials for a certain product billed as the “uncola.” Of course, calling it the “uncola” was excellent marketing and a great product differentiation hook. When you’re trying to market to people (1970’s teenagers) who are generally free-thinking, inquisitive and apt to rebel against authoritative structures, calling it the “un-whatever” builds in a huge amount of street cred from the start.
So why do I mention this? Because lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about “unconferences.”
The schedule board at the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum unconference by user jdlasica on Flickr.
Like the “uncola,” unconferences are still conferences. Conferences are great for bringing together like-minded participants for discussions and networking around shared interests, but conferences on a grand scale can require significant advance planning, expense and other barriers to participation.
The somewhat anarchic shape and structure of the unconference subverts some of the more staid aspects of traditional conferences. Unconferences are designed from the outset to be spontaneous, participant-driven and democratically directed. First of all, they’re fun! Secondly, they offer an informal environment for people to share exploratory work and to test ideas.
The ur-unconference is the 2003 FooCamp, a (now) annual invitation-only conference hosted by Tim O’Reilly (though the concepts behind unconferences go further back to the “Open Space” approaches of the early 1980’s).
The name FooCamp derives from a playful allusion to the programmer slang term foobar, as well as a concomitant acronym for “Friends of O’Reilly.”
BarCamps arose shortly thereafter as an open-to-the-public alternative to the FooCamps, and the model slowly began to spread beyond its original audience of bleeding-edge technologists/developers/entrepreneurs to encompass many domains of knowledge.
While “unconference” is a useful term for describing the total variety of structurally similar events, in practice many gatherings follow on from FooCamp and utilize the *Camp naming convention (WhereCamp, CrisisCamp, CloudCamp and many others). The *Camp model has begun to infiltrate the library, archive and museum universe through the efforts of free-thinking, inquisitive, insurgent librarians, archivists and museum professionals who are tapped into other *Camp networks or who have seen them in action.
There are a number of *Camps where librarians, archivists and museum professionals have played significant roles. The first ThatCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) was held in 2008 at the Center For History and New Media at George Mason University. ThatCamps concentrate on digital humanities issues: the intersection of computing and humanities scholarship, where an expanded scholarly focus goes beyond texts and papers and into multimedia, metadata and dynamic environments (including digital stewardship issues).
CurateCamp started in 2010, sharing members with the Open Repositories and Code4Lib communities, while focusing more tightly on digital curation issues.
Other examples of library, archive and museum unconferences include the “One Big Library Unconference”; the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities API Workshop; and the International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums Summit (LODLAM).
Gadget breakfast at THATCamp LAC by user quinn.anya on Flickr.
Unconferences are a great opportunity for the library, archives and museum communities to tap into the networks of programmers, developers and hackers who can bring skills to bear on community issues that may not be fully recognized or resourced.
It also enables the library, archive and museum communities to address core issues of digital preservation and stewardship by leveraging the motivations and energies surrounding new technology development.
Did I mention that they’re also fun?
EU Consultation on the ERA Framework – closing date November 30 2011
This public consultation aims at gathering views and evidence from stakeholders on the key obstacles which have to be tackled to achieve a well-functioning ERA.
Completing ERA will require the support and effort of all EU Member States and Associated Countries and their stakeholders (e.g. research performing organisations including universities, funding organisations, researchers, private sector and civil society).
For full details see http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/era/consultation_en.htm
We Talked and Talked About Personal Digital Archiving
The following is a guest post by Erin Engle, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP.
A man wanted to migrate his dissertation from punch cards.
Kid and floppy disk, by wlef70, on Flickr
A young girl held a floppy disk for the first time and expressed wonder that it had anything to do with digital information.
A woman-the family archivist-wanted to pass her digital collection to the next generation.
These are some of personal stories I heard at the National Book Festival on the National Mall in Washington, DC this past weekend.
For the second year in a row, NDIIPP participated in the festival, providing personal digital archiving advice to all comers. My colleagues and I had a fantastic time at our table in the Library of Congress Pavilion.
We enjoyed talking with hundreds of people who stopped by. We had the chance to hear directly about hopes, dreams and fears about saving personal digital information. And even more importantly, we spoke with lots of people who hadn’t given much thought to the issue.
NDIIPP Team at the 2011 National Book Festival, by wlef70, on Flickr
Over the two day festival, we passed out handouts providing high-level personal digital archiving tips (based on information from our website), answered questions about how to save digital photos and other forms of digital information, and talked to people about how technology has changed over time.
Computer storage media and other technology changes very quickly, a fact that we demonstrated with a display of obsolete equipment. This is an effective way of reminding people that what they create and save today may not be accessible just a few years later.
We had an array of older storage and computer technology on display. These relics from the past really engaged the public walking past our table. Someone even described it as a “walk down memory lane.” We had examples of punch cards, 8-in and 3.5 in floppy disks, zip disks, hard drives, laser discs, and even an Apple PowerBook Duo 270c from 1992. Talk about a relic!
At the 2011 NBF, by wlef70, on Flickr
I was pleased to see such a positive response from people who stopped to talk to us, told us their personal stories of the family memory projects they’re working on or just stopped by to say, “I remember floppy disks, I still have some lying around.” Our engagement with people at the book festival is one of highlights from last year and I can say right now, it will be for 2011!
Thanks to everyone who visited us at this year’s book festival. We’d love your feedback, so take a few minutes and fill out this Library of Congress has a survey.
See you next year!
Simple, Weak, Scalable and Open: Concepts to Live by in Developing New Solutions
The 2011 Annual Summer Meeting of DataCite, brought data lovers from several nations to Berkeley, CA, recently. A celebration of access and preservation ensued, with communal sharing of case studies, best practices and ideas for future work.
FRIES BY MONTH, by Lauren Manning, on Flickr
DataCite is an organization with members from national libraries and other organizations from around the world that are working to develop a global citation framework for data.
In a previous post, I talked about the growing importance of making scientific research data easier to find and use. Researchers in different disciplines are pushing for enhanced data access and reuse to extend learning and make new discoveries. A key part of making this happen is ensuring that data sets are discoverable through a uniform method of citation a manner similar to that long in place for the published journal articles that summarize research findings.
The DataCite meeting featured sessions on community trends and practices, data and the scholarly output, the role of data archives in identifying and preserving data, and the role of publishers in managing research data. Presentations from the meeting are available here.
TouchGraph-Facebook3, by Glenn Zucman, on Flickr
A highlight of the meeting was the opening keynote by John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science, Creative Commons. He stated that DataCite is tackling a hard problem: developing a citation method while people are also still trying to figure out how researchers use data and also how best to preserve it. The primary purpose of citation itself is also spread across different concepts that are difficult to disentangle, including providing credit, tracking influence, and advancing science.
Wilbanks described data citation as facilitating a series of codependent activities:
- Find data
- Access data
- Understand Data
- Be influenced by data
- Provide credit back for influence
In developing solutions, he urged adhering to some basic concepts.
Simple and weak. Initial efforts to develop new solutions often fail, so it is important to guard against wasted effort. A wiser course is to develop systems and services that are easy to implement and use. This enables quick development of practical experience and identification of what works and what doesn’t.
Scalable and open. Use of the least powerful solution to a problem typically enables the most rapid scaling. And as solutions grow, they draw critics. Openness allows critics to fix and change things as they see fit.
Wilbanks also stressed what he saw as the critical role of data archivists and librarians: helping researchers find important data sets and steering them away from “nonsense data.” He stated that the traditional role of archivists and librarians in keeping and locating information will grow as data accumulates in volume, diversity and importance.
CINES joins APA
We are pleased to announce that CINES has joined the APA.
C.I.N.E.S. (Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur), is located in Montpellier (France), and offers computer services to the scientific community in public research and higher education. It is a public national institution, under the authority of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.
CINES operates state of the art computer services in:
- High-Performance Computing (supercomputer ranked 24 in the Top500 as of June 2011) : facilities, services and user’s support;
- Long term data and digital document preservation: CINES is the national center for the archive of PhD Theses from French universities, and several other repositories related to humanities (PAC, the CINES preservation platform, stores 12To of scientific data as of June 2011);
- Hosting of computer equipment.
It also offers training sessions in High Performance Computing and Internet Data Communication, in cooperation with RENATER, the French national network for research and higher education (CIREN).
CINES is one of the Tier-1 computer operators and sites of national relevance selected by GENCI, in charge of financing large HPC infrastructures for the French public research.
CINES is currently involved in European projects such as PRACE, PRACE-1IP, PRACE-2IP, HPC Europa 2, APARSEN, EUDAT, etc.
On remembering, and the economic value of data
I had forgotten (ironic, really) the reason why I was interested in Facebook over the weekend. I had listened briefly to BBC Radio 4′s Today programme on Saturday morning, and there was a short segment on the recent Facebook changes. This link may not stay around, and may not be accessible outside the UK, so I’ll try to quote what I need to make my points. The protagonists were presenter John Humphreys (who appeared never to have used Facebook), Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital, and Viktor Mayer-Scheonberger, Professor of Internet Governance at Oxford Internet Institute. I don’t know these people at all.
Two things caused my ears to perk up. Near the end, Viktor M-S (who appears to have a book, possible called “Delete” to promote, that I have not read) suggests that in the analogue world the default is to forget, but “now we have shifted, in the digital agetoward a system, and Facebook is a prime example of this, where the default is in fact remembering”. What struck me was how opposed this statement was to the rhetoric of digital preservation, where the story is all about how the digital age will cause all of us to forget everything, unless we set up Trusted Digital repositories to ingest our content and disseminate it to us, later, having made appropriate obeisance to the great god OAIS. I’ve written before that I think these issues are overstated, so I won’t repeat it here, but I was sympathetic to the good Viktor.
The other thing that I noticed was Julie Meyer saying (in relation to the data that Facebook snaffles about us) “an asset of ourselves is being used by a company and we’re not getting anything out of it”. At another point she says “we’re not getting any economic value for our data”.
Now in this case, I think she is just plain wrong. Facebook runs a vast, highly expensive network that provides valued services to hundreds of millions of people, for free. Access to that free network is the economic value we get from Facebook having access to our data.In fact, that data is critical to Facebook’s sustainability.
However, as I’ve discovered since (see previous post), it’s not just our actions in the Facebook site that are being “sucked in” to Facebook, nor even our actions on sites that we have agreed should give data to Facebook. Any page we visit on the web that had a Facebook Like button will plant a cookie in our browser and leave a trace of our visit for Facebook (or other advertisers perhaps) to exploit. I can’t see a way to stop that other than denying or deleting Facebook cookies every day. That’s the data that we’re not getting economic value for. It may also be data that is against European privacy laws, and I certainly wonder if it is contrary to the UK Data Protection Act!
Stopping those dang Facebook cookies in Firefox
And now for something completely different…
From somewhere in my twitter stream (possibly @glynmoody) I read http://nikcub-static.appspot.com/logging-out-of-facebook-is-not-enough. I’ve always been slightly bothered by Facebook, and the news about their new “features” seemed rather more scary. This is doubly so since I don’t really understand the implications, but I did remember seeing a working paper by Arnold Rosendahl [1] last year that was itself fairly scary. I would really quite like to get out of it altogether (and I rarely if ever post anything there), but there are a few people I care about who use it, and it would be hard to kep in touch without it. Anyway, I decided to further reduce my Facebook usage, exploring all the settings I could find.
Having done that, I checked my cookies (I used Safari as the default browser), and discovered cookies for facebook.com and facebook.net. I deleted them and thought that was that. Off I went for a walk. Back later, check twitter, only click on one link, to a Guardian article. Notice the Facebook cookie thing is still reverberating around my twitter stream, so I decide to check cookies again. Eeek, facebook.com and facebook.net are back! Well, it seems no matter what I do, I can’t keep facebook cookies out of Safari. One twitter contact suggested deleting all cookies at the end of every session, but I wasn’t sure of the implications of that.
Checking Firefox, I found some options that would block cookies from individual sites. I couldn’t find an equivalent option in Safari, even after a lot of searching. To cut a long story short, I decided to make Firefox my default browser, and to deny Facebook cookies. Another twitter contact asked me how this could be done, hence this post!
(BTW at least Safari and Firefox both allow you to see what cookies you have got in a reasonably understandable way. We have a XP machine with IE7, and all I can see there is an indigestible list of thousands of cookies in apparently random order!)
Now, the danger in what is below is that I don’t understand the implications of everything I’ve tried. So, your mileage may vary!
First, you may have Facebook cookies and be divulging information to Facebook, even if you don’t use it. You only have to visit a site which hosts a Facebook Like button! There are a lot of these; they are not explicit about what they are doing or its implications!
I’m using Firefox 6.0.2 on a Mac… Open Preferences, click on the Privacy tab. I have checked the box that says “Tell web sites I don’t want to be tracked” (but I don’t know what it does).
Under History, use Custom settings from the drop-down selection. I have un-checked Permanent Private Browsing mode, but the next 4 boxes are checked (3 remember history buttons, and accept cookies from sites). Of course, you can uncheck the latter, but quite a lot of things get hard if you do. Let’s leave the Exceptions button for the moment. I have also unchecked “accept 3rd party cookies”. I’ve got “Keep until” set to “ask me every time” (but it doesn’t seem to do that). I mentioned that a twitter contact sets his to delete at the end of every session (but remember that Firefox now keeps sessions open in case you want to resume them).
(Actually I realise that the Keep Until setting of Ask me every time explains why sites are now asking me if I will accept their cookies; a slightly different interpretation than I expected. I can deny, allow for session or allow for ever on an individual cookie basis.)
Now you should click on the Show Cookies button. Generally, it shows groups of cookies; you’ll probably see one for facebook.com and one for facebook.net. As an example, if you find the google.co.uk group, open the group, click through the list of cookies, and you’ll probably see that most of the cookies are expired (dates in the past). I have one google.co.uk cookie (SNID) with an expiry date in the future. You can remove individual cookies in this list, or the whole lot of them.
Back up the page a bit, click on the Exceptions button. Here you can specify a (exact) web address and either block or allow cookies from that site. I currently have developers.facebook.com and facebook.com set to be blocked, and a bunch of others allowed. I should possibly block facebook.net.
OK, that’s about all I know, and I don’t know the implications of this either! Good luck
[1] Roosendaal, A. (2010). Facebook Tracks and Traces Everyone: Like this! Tilburg. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1717563
Personal Digital Archiving at the National Book Festival, Sept. 24 and Sept. 25
The following is a guest post by Erin Engle, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP.
Like many here at the Library, we’re busy preparing for the 2011 National Book Festival on the mall in Washington, DC. The festival will take place Saturday, Sept. 24 and Sunday, Sept. 25.
Getting personal digital archiving advice at the 2010 National Book Festival, by Wlef70, on Flickr
The festival now runs over two days and includes more talks and readings by authors, illustrators and poets. There’s a good chance one of your favorites authors is coming.
I have a personal reason to be extra excited this year: I’m joining my colleagues to talk about personal digital archiving with book festival goers. We’ll provide information in the Preserve Your Photos area of the Library of Congress Pavilion (here’s a handy PDF map that shows where the pavilion is located). We were at the festival last year and had a great time talking with hundreds of people.
Over the past few years, NDIIPP has developed tips for getting starting with digital archiving for digital photographs and other kinds of personal materials. This section of our website is very popular, and it is clear that many people are eager for advice about how to save their personal digital memories.
Selection of obsolete media at the 2010 National Book Festival, by wlef70, on Flickr
This is why we are thrilled to participate in the book festival: it gives us a wonderful opportunity to extend our reach and speak with a huge public audience. They ask us questions and tell us about their challenges in managing their digital files. We enjoy helping people sort out these issues and see this work as crucial part of our commitment to public service. These kinds of conversations also help us think about how to improve our personal archiving tips.
The book festival is one of many public outreach events we’ve participated in over the past few years to raise the awareness about personal digital preservation. We’ve held a Personal Archiving Day two years running; presented webinars on preserving personal digital memories; produced videos explaining digital preservation topics; talked at Smithsonian-sponsored events; and written about saving our personal memories in this blog.
If you’ll be in the DC area this weekend, visit the National Book Festival and stop by our table and say hello. We’ll have staff on hand to answer your questions, provide you with some handouts and show off some fascinating examples of old computer technology.
Repush
Repush
Commit for new version 0.9.6
Commit for new version 0.9.6
Finally!! AES audio schemas
After more than a decade of work, AES finally has published two important audio metadata standards.
AES60-2011: AES standard for audio metadata – Core audio metadata
This specification addresses the creation, management and preservation of material that can be re-used as originally produced, or may provide input material for new production projects. Material is expected to be exchanged between various organisations or between production facilities in a distributed environment.
AES57-2011: AES standard for audio metadata – Audio object structures for preservation and restoration
AES57-2011 sets out the vocabulary to be used in describing digital and analog audio formats, including both those formats that exist in some tangible form such as a reel of tape and those that exist only as a set of bits, untied to a single audio carrier, such as a broadcast wave file.
Update: So far the actual schemas don’t seem to be online. I’ll post their URL’s as soon as I find out where they are.