Prometheus - Glossary

General Definitions:

General definitions of terms used throughout the development of the Prometheus project. 

Accessions Sheet

An Accessions Sheet is a registry entry within the Manuscripts Accessions Registry which is used to generate and to track the various components of a specific donation or purchased lot within manuscripts.  An Accessions Sheet can have many Items or boxes and associated sub-items.

Bibliographic Record

A Bibliographic Record is the Bibliographic Record of an intellectual work. A Bibliographic Record can have many Holdings.

Born Digital

Electronic records which are created within a digital manner in during day to day business are referred to digitally created materials. They were not intended to have an analogue equivalent (paper) and probably only exist in digital form. They have a ‘formal’ status by Creator.

Catalogue Record

The Catalogue Record can either be a Bibliographic Record or an Accessions Sheet Record.

Digital Holdings Persistent Identifier

A unique number allocated by Prometheus Digital Preservation Workflow system to a Digital Object (eg nla.dp-nXXXXX). This number can be used to provide a future access link to a related Digital Preservation Job or Part.

Digital Publications

These are born digital objects which have been expressly released for wider access and either distributed free of charge or for a fee.

Digital Preservation

A management series of actions required to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary.

Digital Preservation Work Flow

A specific Workflow which describes a digital preservation action, such as "Imaging an Item", or "Normalising a File". When a User begins performing a Digital Preservation Workflow, the specific Workflow which they begin will dictate the actions that are available to them. For example, starting an "Imaging an Item" Workflow allows the User to image media on their computer, but not perform Normalization Actions.

File

A File is a single self contained bitstream that exists on a file system (such as FAT32 or ISO9660). The file may not be stored as a continuous stream in its original form. This could be a JPEG picture or a Word Document - there is no distinction.

Holding

A Holding is a location for a Bibliographic Collection item. A Holding can have many Items.

Image

An Image is a file that expresses an exact digital reproduction of the information stored on a physical digital object. It is sometimes referred to as a disk image. The process of making an image records the information on a physical digital object without looking at the specific files stored on the object, and without making any distinctions about the format of the files systems stored on the media.
See also wikipedia entry on Disk Images.

Item

An Item is an item or collection of items, which for the purposes of Bibliographic cataloging is considered to be a single conceptual unit. For example, an Item might be a collection of issues of a Serial.

Although they may not be individually identified within the Catalogue or within the Holdings record or physically within the Holdings location itself; within the Digital Preservation Workflow an Item shall be only one "instance" of that Serial e.g. Vol. 10 Issue 3, October 1987, etc. to better enable access and discovery to an item. The Item may have parts such as a supplement, container or booklet.

Job

A Job within the Prometheus system is the process by which one creates an annotated relationship between a Bibliographic Record’s digital media Holding in the NLA Catalogue (Voyager) and the digital preservation archive of that digital media within the Prometheus digital repository for future access. This enables the user to process material that has been assessed as qualifying for Digital Preservation action to enable future access and allows the user to process the material in a managed way that will ensure that sufficient descriptive and technical documentation will be added or automatically harvested to ensure on-going access to the material.

The Job consists of mostly tracking type information and Digital Preservation annotations to a specifically targeted a Bibliographic Record or Accession item reference and it’s associated Holding reference.

Metadata

Metadata is a classical Greek preposition (μετ’ αλλων εταιρων) and prefix (μεταβασις) conveying the following senses in English, depending upon the case of the associated noun: among; along with; with; by means of; in the midst of; after; behind.[1] In epistemology, the word means "about (its own category)"; thus metadata is "data about the data". [courtesy of Wikipedia]

It typically is descriptive of the contents, location, physical, technical attributes, type (e.g. text or image, map, audio or video) and form of a resource or helps provide access to a resource.

Optical Disc Case

These are high quality compact (5mm spine) clear, unbreakable, flexible polypropylene cases are recommended for rehousing CDs / DVDs. Often this will be replacing the brittle original 'Jewel' cases familiar to Music CD users.
 

Part

A Job can have multiple Parts with each Part corresponding to one discrete component of an Holding Item. Each physical media item (CD-ROM, Floppy Disk etc) associated within a Holding will be come a separate Part within a Job. Each Part should be uniquely named to match its corresponding physical media’s name.

Process

A process is one step within a Workflow. A process can represent a different Work Flow in itself or could consist of a series of sub-processes.

Stubs

The term ‘stub’ refers to a media Part which is not fully processed or uploaded using the application, but which the user wants to associate with an item so that all the Parts are known and recorded, even if not all can be uploaded to preservation storage.

A ‘stub’ can be created or declared in a number of cases:

  • a media Part is registered and processing commences, but cannot be Completed due to error conditions, or similar. A user can then declare this Part a stub and allow the Job to be submitted for ingest (excluding the Part).

  • a media Part is created, but there is no attempt to process it – e.g. no suitable drive is available. However, a user wants to register that the media Part exists, so that it is known for future reference. A user can declare a stub at any time without attempting processing. An error state does not need to exist to allow a user to declare a stub.

Workflow:

A Workflow is a specific sequence of processes (human or otherwise) to achieve a specific purpose. 

 
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