Generating Best Effort Preservation Metadata for Web Resources at Time of Dissemination

HTTP and MIME, while sufficient for contemporary web
page access, do not provide enough forensic information to
enable the long-term preservation of the resources they de-
scribe and transport. But what if the originating web server
automatically provided preservation metadata encapsulated
with the resource at time of dissemination ? Perhaps the in-
gestion process could be streamlined, with additional foren-
sic metadata available to future information archeologists.
We have adapted an Apache web server implementation of
OAI-PMH which can utilize third-party metadata analysis
tools to provide a metadata-rich description of each resource.
The resource and its forensic metadata are packaged to-
gether as a complex ob ject, expressed in plain ASCII and
XML. The result is a CRATE: a self-contained preservation-
ready version of the resource, created at time of dissemina-
tion.