Jerry and Nancy Hoebelheinrich: Thanks for the notes about "provenance"
and "process." It is difficult to come up with the perfect word, hence
this exchange.

One version of the OAIS definition for provenance is this: "Provenance
Information describes the source of Content Information, who has had
custody of it, what is its history." (from a 1999 PowerPoint from the
OAIS guys) This may cover a bit more ground than what we had in our
processMD, which was focused on the chain of events that transformed X
without attempting to offer a full description of X.

We worry less about the fit to the OAIS dictionary than the possible
terminological dissonance with our colleagues in libraries, archives,
and (above all) museums, where _provenance_ has a special meaning that
may lead to confusion here.

Thus Nancy's suggestion of a combined term like "preservprocess" may
have merit. There is logic to a term that expresses our wish to embrace
BOTH preservation-meaning-reformatting and
preservation-including-digital-migration. But the logic of this term
may not outweigh its phonemic disadvantages. Meanwhile, one of our
colleagues suggested alternates along the lines of "digiprov" or
"digiprocess."

Dear readers! Can anyone suggest the perfect term?

Carl Fleischhauer
Library of Congress