The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mätauranga o Aotearoa (NLNZ) has a legislative mandate "to collect, preserve and make available recorded knowledge, particularly that relating to New Zealand" [1].

In common with other cultural institutions, the Library is undergoing a period of intense change brought about by the quantity of digital resources that must be managed and the knowledge that the rate at which we accumulate this material will dramatically increase year on year. The complexity of digital objects is a concern, as is the rising proportion that are "born digital" rather than as digital copies of analogue items from the Library's collections.

NLNZ is adopting a holistic approach to the long-term management of its digital assets. The Library has established a Digital Library Transition Team to: Develop and implement business process workflows Specify infrastructure for digital material, e.g., storage, access, data authentication Research and develop a range of Digital Library activities, e.g., metadata (resource discovery, preservation, structural) and persistent identifiers Pilot web harvesting for the capture and preservation of New Zealand web sites Implement production processes for bulk digitisation of textual materials. The primary objective is that processes for digital objects become "business as usual" The primary objective is that processes for digital objects become "business as usual" for the Library. This includes activities relating to digital preservation. In contrast to the inertia that may seem an understandable response to what some describe as an unmanageable flood of digital materials, NLNZ is developing pragmatic business-oriented processes for managing this material, for the long term.

One component of the digital preservation puzzle is preservation metadata. NLNZ has developed a Preservation Metadata Schema [2] designed to strike a balance between the principles expressed in the OAIS Information Model [3] and the practicalities of implementing a working set of preservation metadata. This tension has informed a recent OCLC/RLG report [4] and work at the University of North Carolina [5]. A pragmatic response to this environment is required, one that recognises the need to implement a workable solution within existing resources and organisational structures.

This article introduces the NLNZ schema, describes the environment in which it was conceived and identifies areas of further development, which will include: Developing data definitions for the elements in the schema Designing a repository based on those data definitions Investigating and developing tools for automatically extracting metadata to populate the repository.