Whitepaper

New Paper on Embedded Metadata

By: Joshua Ranger
April 9, 2014

Newly available on our Papers and Presentations page is AVPreserve President Chris Lacinak‘s paper Embedded Metadata in WAVE Files: A Look Inside Issues and Tools. Embedded metadata is crucial to managing digital assets, supporting activities as varied as making it easy to find and listen to music in iTunes, authenticating the source and content of a photograph, and performing quality control on content that has been digitized from analog sources. The key duties of an archive — promoting findability, usability, and persistence of collections — would be nearly impossible without embedded metadata.

Chris’ paper gives an overview of embedded metadata in general and then focuses on the specific uses of it in WAVE audio files. For several years we have been working with the Federal Agencies Guidelines Digitization Initiative Audio Visual Working Group (FADGI) to support their efforts in developing standards around the creation and care of digital audiovisual files. A particular effort here involved establishing recommendations for what information to embed in WAVE audio files, which resulted in the development by AVPreserve of the BWF MetaEdit tool. BWF MetaEdit can become a part of production, digitization, and preservation workflows to help users review embedded metadata and to edit or create it across batches of audio files. Our research in the development of the tool also led to several findings regarding the persistence of metadata as files are transferred, ingested, or accessed within various software applications, results which can have a severe impact on the management and preservation of files.

Embedded Metadata in WAVE Files can be downloaded for free directly at https://www.avpreserve.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/EmbeddedMetadata.pdf or on our Papers and Presentations page along with many other free resources.