[Esip-preserve] Thinking Points on Metadata Provenance Issues

[Bruce Barkstrom]

I was looking up some collection metadata and found that a significant
fraction of references for metadata had URL 404 messages.  This raises
a couple of points to ponder:

1.  How frequently do archives or repositories need to check for URL's
whose sites have gone missing?

2.  Does the archive that had been maintaining the links to these sites
need to search to find replacement information?

3.  Would it be appropriate to require at least three independent URL
sites that maintain equivalent sources of information?

4.  What sources would provide the "authentic" sources of metadata
and how would an archive provide a chain of evidence that those
sources really give correct information?

Note that this issue is not about the trustworthiness of data,
but about the trustworthiness of metadata.  As an
example, Capt. James Cook had three expeditions that produced
a huge set of biological specimens and journals and logs about
those voyages.  Do we trust Wikipedia to give us the correct
dates for the start and end of each of those three expeditions?
Should we get the dates from a source such as
Horowitz, T., 2002: Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain
Cook Has Gone Before, Henry Holt and Co., New York, NY
(which the cover says is a "NY Times Best Seller")?  How about
the 1898 Encyclopedia Britannica?  Cook's journals?  If it's
Cook's journals, are we sure that he's given dates in our
current Gregorian system or might he have used the Julian
calendar, which England adopted much later than the Continent
did?

Similar questions can crop up in other areas than dates.  How could
an investigator check on instrument serial numbers?  Or the latitude,
longitude, and altitude of a weather station?  Did the station use
barometric pressure for altitude - and if so, how do we check on how
the station converted geopotential to geometric altitude?  Do we have
to have a written chain-of-evidence or can we trust a digital chain?
This could be written a bit more formally as

5.  How could an investigator audit a chain-of-evidence record
for metadata?  Do we need to consider recommendations regarding
what we mean by an auditable chain-of-evidence?

Bruce B.
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