Love (Meta)Data with Permanent.org

Every year during the week of Valentine’s Day, universities, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, corporations and individuals join together to celebrate Love Data Week, an international celebration of data. At Permanent, we’re celebrating Love Data Week by sharing with you our new and upcoming changes to metadata features on Permanent.org. A preserved file without description and context isn’t truly preserved, so Permanent.org provides basic metadata fields as well as extended metadata options to ensure that anyone can use metadata to capture their most cherished stories and memories.

We value hearing from our members so we can make a platform that meets diverse needs and adheres to the changing standards and best practices of preservation. Recently, we developed our custom metadata feature which allows you to create any new field you would like to add to a file.  We developed this feature after speaking with many professional archivist members of our community who wanted to use Dublin Core metadata on Permanent.org. This feature ensures that anyone can use any metadata standard they are familiar with or that makes sense for their particular collection.

To build this feature, we utilized a feature of our database that allows us to create field:value pairs for tags. This means that our database recognizes a field:value pair and can read the field and value separately. We worked with one of our designers to design a new section for these field:value tags. Then, we brought that design to a few of our members for additional feedback before implementing it. The feature also includes a page where you can manage your field:value entries by editing or deleting them if you make a mistake.

Additionally, our metadata entry will soon allow for bulk editing of multiple files’ metadata in response to requests we received from our members. This forthcoming feature will allow you to add or replace the entries for metadata fields for multiple files at a time, as well as change the titles of the files to make them sequential or follow a certain format. Bulk metadata editing is currently in development, and we hope to release the feature later in 2023. 

Metadata is an important step in the preservation process, and we hope that you take advantage of our current and forthcoming metadata features to ensure that your story is preserved. For Love Metadata Week, we challenge you to spend ten minutes or less to add new metadata to five of your files. Whether that new metadata be descriptions of the files, dates, locations, tags, or a metadata field of your own using the extended metadata feature, the added description will ensure that your stories and memories are preserved for the next generation.