"Understanding PREMIS" is now available from the PREMIS Maintenance Activity website. This document is a "gentle" introduction to the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, giving an overview of its scope and goals. It does not give enough information for implementation, but will make the larger document, i.e. the PREMIS Data Dictionary, more familiar.
"Understanding PREMIS" was written by Priscilla Caplan, Florida Center for Library Automation, for the Library of Congress. It is available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/understanding-premis.pdf
The full PREMIS Data Dictionary is available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/premis/v2/premis-2-0.pdf
Dictionary and its supporting documentation is a comprehensive, practical resource for implementing preservation metadata in digital archiving systems. Preservation metadata is defined as information that
preservation repositories need to know to support digital materials over the long term.
The Metadata Extraction Tool programmatically extracts preservation metadata from a range of file formats including PDF documents, image files, sound files, office documents, and many others. It automatically extracts preservation-related metadata from digital files then outputs that metadata in XML. It can be used through a graphical user interface or command-line interface."


