August 6, 2008 -- Robert Horton, the Library, Publications and Collections Director at the Minnesota Historical Society, visited the Library of Congress on August 6 to share the latest developments of the Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State Government Digital Information project, which is exploring methods to capture, preserve and provide enhanced access to legislative materials in digital form.
The meeting brought together representatives of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the Law Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service and House of Representatives staff to, as Horton said, "help state legislators do more with digital content."
Horton began the meeting by sharing a draft of a core XML schema prepared by MHS in consultation with the Minnesota legislature IT staff, Thomson Reuters information architects and the XMaLpha consultancy. The proposed schema provides a simple set of metadata elements that organizations could use to create crosswalks between the complex and widely varying schemas found in legislatures that are currently using XML bill-drafting systems.
The schema would support establishing the authenticity of and managing the resources, as well as searching across complementary resources, such as committee reports or audiovisual session documentation. The schema would also provide design input for legislatures considering the implementation of an XML-based bill-drafting system.
"We are aiming to develop a lightweight core schema," Horton said. "We want something that is relatively easy for different organizations to adopt and use."
The project plans to revise the schema in conjunction with the Minnesota Revisor’s office. A draft version will then be reviewed by the project’s state partners (CA, IL, KS, MS, TN and VT), all of whom bring a wide range of capabilities and interests to the project. The schema will continue to be reviewed by community interests, with a final draft scheduled to be released at the end of the project.
This project is one of four initial state-level projects funded by the Library under the NDIIPP States program.
