A Sound Strategy for Preservation: Adapting Audio Engineering Society Technical Metadata for Use in Multimedia Repositories

Preservation of our audiovisual heritage is critical, and technical metadata is at the heart of any effective preservation program. This article documents the efforts of Rutgers University Libraries to implement the Audio Engineering Society’s (AES) draft “Audio Object” schema, AES-X098B, extend it for moving images, align it with existing standards, and integrate it with technical metadata for text, three-dimensional objects, and graphics. The article compares several existing and emerging technical metadata standards, provides a description and assessment of the AES schema, and concludes with an application profile for several New Jersey repositories.