Ah, the joys of the "Do we ask them to do the right thing, or force
them to do the right thing" discussion.

I'd argue for forcing them to do the right thing at *least* until you've
written the documentation, in detail, which explains what the right
thing is and why you think it's the right thing, and I don't think we
quite have that yet, yes?

On Oct 7, 2005, at 1:02 PM, Rebecca S. Guenther wrote:

> I'm beginning to wonder whether there should be any mandatory
> elements in
> the PREMIS schemas, or at least in the Object and Event schemas.
>
> The definition of mandatory in the PREMIS data dictionary is "what a
> repository needs to know". It acknowledges that there are different
> ways
> for the repository to know the mandatory data elements and they
> don't have
> to be explicitly recorded.
>
> So considering the following scenario:
>
> I might make a METS document for what is a set of files, called a
> representation in PREMIS, also in my case equivalent to an
> intellectual
> entity. I may want to include some PREMIS metadata about the Object
> that
> is the representation. If I use Object.xsd objectIdentifier is a
> mandatory
> element. But my objectIdentifier is already part of my METS
> document as
> objID, so I have already satisfied the mandatory requirement, but I'm
> forced to repeat it in the PREMIS Object metadata. If I also want to
> include Event in digiProv to give information about the fact that I
> digitized this object, I have to include an eventIdentifier, even
> though I don't really have a system that generates event
> identifiers so
> I'll just be making it up to satisfy the schema.
>
> So I wonder if any elements should be mandatory, given the
> difference in
> the PREMIS data dictionary definition of mandatory and the XML schema
> definition.
>
> Rebecca
>

Jerome McDonough, Asst. Professor
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, Room 202
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-5916
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