Thanks Amy and Stephen for your answers! We have a couple use cases where I think what you suggest will work - keep the metadata and record the expungement event in it, even though we are actually deleting the content (not inactivating it). The 2 cases are when we legally have to get rid of the content (e.g. if we were to inadvertently collect child porn. during a web crawl), or when we want to clean out large amounts of test data. We also support "basic" deletions where we do something similar to you Amy - we flag the content as deleted so that it can't be accessed by end users but allow it to be restored if necessary.

We have a third odd case where we're actually doing a metadata-only expungement. Odd case I know but we're in the middle of a really big metadata migration between our old and new repository and need to be able to recover from errors. The idea is that if we find a mistake in the metadata migration for any set of content we'll be able to get rid of the metadata for that content in the new repository and rerun the migration on it. In this case there's nowhere to record the event but we may be able to log it.

This has been helpful.

thanks,
Andrea

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Amy Kirchhoff [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 12:26 PM
> To: Goethals, Andrea; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: RE: documenting events not associated with content
> 
> Hi Andrea ~
> 
> At Portico, each archival unit may have multiple content units (and
> each content unit may or may not be ACTIVE).
> 
> An e-journal article would be an archival unit.  We may have several
> versions of the e-journal article (this is different from different
> versions of specific files within the article).  We would address this
> problem by making the original content unit inactive, so that it could
> not be accessed by end users.  We would create a new content unit that
> contained the original metadata, plus an explanation of the retraction.
> Most of our publishers, send us retractions in this way -- it comes as
> an update with modified metadata to explain the retraction and usually
> the original PDF, just stamped with the word "retraction" on every
> page.
> 
> If we were under a court order to actually delete the content (as
> opposed to just inactivate it), we would still leave an archival unit
> behind with the original metadata and an explanation, if at all legally
> possible.
> 
> ~ Amy
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The NDSA Standards working group list [mailto:NDSA-
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Goethals, Andrea
> Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 11:21 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [NDSA-STANDARDS] documenting events not associated with
> content
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Since we have 'Practices' in our name I thought I'd ask you all how you
> handle something that we need to address in our repository. For various
> reasons we have the need to support 'expungements' where we delete a
> particular set of content and its metadata. We document other
> significant events in PREMIS metadata embedded in object descriptors,
> but after this action there won't be any metadata for this content to
> record the event.
> 
> I'd like to keep some kind of record that the expungement happened
> though but am not aware of any 'standard' or common ways of recording
> high-level repository events outside of PREMIS events associated with
> content. Do any of you have a method for doing this or know of any used
> in other preservation repositories?
> 
> thanks,
> Andrea
> 
> _________________________________________
> Andrea Goethals
> Digital Preservation and Repository Services Manager Harvard Library
> [log in to unmask]
> (617) 495-3724
> 
> 
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