PeDALS partners meeting: day one

My Arizona vacation came about because I needed to travel to Phoenix for a Persistent Digital Archives and Library System (PeDALS) project partners meeting. PeDALS, which is funded by the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, is designed to allow the state libraries and state archives of Arizona (the project lead), Florida, New York, South Carolina, and Wisconsin to:

• Develop a highly automated workflow for acquiring, describing, and providing access to electronic government publications and records.
• Build a storage network that inexpensively and reliably preserves the authenticity and integrity of records and publications.

I'm being purposely vague about the day's proceedings because our discussions are still in progress (and may not be resolved for some time), but I think I can say that we spent some time this morning reviewing project progress and timelines, but devoted most of the day to a review of the draft metadata schema that we developed several months ago. We also engaged in some real-world exploration of two metadata extraction tools: JHOVE and the National Library of New Zealand's MetaExtractor. We got a lot of work done today, and tomorrow promises to be just as intense and fruitful.