Guidelines for Curation Metadata

At the Curation Workshop I heard the question "Well, when we created our digital collection, we just kept the filenames, but we realize now that that's not enough; what should we have kept as metadata?"

So, I jotted down how I would approach that question, starting from the roles that are played by the metadata. Here is a link to these Guidelines for Designing Metadata (PDF format). I thought it might be helpful to curators.

Standards of Authenticity

Authenticity of digital objects affects us all regardless of whether we curate, preserve, access, or create them. As an authoritative body, our integrity is on the line. In a world where digital objects are moved from one physical storage media to another because the first media has reached the end of its lifespan, and where an object must be migrated from its original data format to one or more other formats because the original format is no longer accessible, what are the principles that guide our choices and by which the quality of our objects can be measured?

For example, a digital image captured in a Sony Mavica (proprietary) data format on flash memory is migrated to a TIFF data format on a gold-based CD. What will be our rationale for asserting the authenticity of the image once it is a TIFF and on a CD?

So I ask the question: by what standards do we determine a digital object's authenticity?