Creating and Consuming Metadata from Transcribed Historical Vital Records for Ingestion in a Long-Term Digital Preservation Platform

In the Irish Record Linkage 1864-1913 (IRL) project, digital archivists transcribe digitized register pages containing vital records into a database, which is then used to generate RDF triples. Historians then use those triples to answer some specific research questions on the IRL platform. Though the triples themselves are a highly valuable asset that can be adopted by many, the digitized records and their RDF representations need to be adequately stored and preserved according to best standards and guidelines to ensure those do not get lost over time. This was a problem currently not investigated within this project. This paper reports on the creation of Qualified Dublin Core from those triples for ingestion with the digitized register pages in an adequate long-term digital preservation platform and repository. Rather than creating RDF only for the purpose of this project, we demonstrate how we can distill artifacts from the RDF that is fit for discovery, access, and even reuse via that repository and how we elicit and conserve the knowledge and memories about Ireland, its history and culture contained in those register pages.