Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands

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The international standard on metadata for records ISO 23081 has been incorporated into the Dutch legislation on archives. This paper gives an introduction to initiatives pursued by central government to develop metadata schemas and implement application profiles. The National Archives of the Netherlands has developed an e-Depot (Trusted Digital Repository). To transfer electronic records to the e-Depot, the records and the metadata linked to them are wrapped as a Submission Information Package (SIP) using an XML-schema called MeDuSa. This XML-schema defines the structure of the SIP as well as a set of metadata elements, and has been developed simultaneously and in compliance with the metadata schema for the Dutch government. To make colleagues, archivists, records managers, information architects and others familiar with the most important concepts concerning metadata, a ‘Metadata Game’ has also been developed.

Historic parchment is an extremely complex ma- terial, not only due to the various methods of production used and various past environmental histories of objects, but also due to its inhomogeneous structure. Many traditional methods of characterisation are empirical, but useful since they have gained recognition by the end-users. In this pa- per, we investigated the shrinkage temperature of collagen and the influence of lipids contained in parchment on the measurements. While the content of lipids does not seem to significantly affect shrinkage temperature measurements themselves, it strongly affects the decrease of shrinkage tem- perature of collagen during degradation, and thus its thermo- mechanical properties. This confirms the high importance of lipid peroxidation during degradation of parchment. While shrinkage temperature determination is a micro- destructive method, we also demonstrated that it is possible

The fast changes of technologies in today's information landscape have considerably shortened the lifespan of digital objects. Digital preservation has become a pressing challenge. Different strategies such as migration and emulation have been proposed; however, the decision for a specific tool e.g. for format migration or an emulator is very complex. The process of evaluating potential solutions against specific requirements and building a plan for preserving a given set of objects is called preservation planning. So far, it is a mainly manual, sometimes ad-hoc process with little or no tool support. This paper presents a service-oriented architecture and decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning process and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours.