PREMIS Version 2.1 now available

January 6, 2011

The PREMIS Editorial Committee is pleased to announce the availability of the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata version 2.1. Since the publication of version 2.0, implementation of PREMIS has increased substantially and experience using the specification has resulted in the need for additional revisions. The current revision includes corrections of errors, clarifications of some semantic units, changes for consistency, and the addition of a few semantic units that resulted from requests to the PREMIS Editorial Committee. This revision is considered non-substantial in that there are not major changes that affect existing PREMIS descriptions, so is an incremental version 2.1. Both the full data dictionary and the schema are revised.

Highlights of version 2.1 include:

The following new elements are added to the Agent Entity

agentNote
agentExtension
linkingEventIdentifier
linkingRightsStatementIdentifier

A new extension mechanism allows for additional information about the metadata. This technique is modeled after METS and includes:

Date the metadata was created
Status of the metadata
Internal IDs to provide links
Type of metadata (i.e. the metadata scheme) and version
Message digest and message digest algorithm of the metadata
Type of location identifier when reference is to external metadata

The agent changes are included in both the data dictionary and the schema. The extension mechanism is described in general terms in the data dictionary and the new elements are added to the revised schema.

The revised data dictionary and schema are available at:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis