This section outlines some key concepts in understanding and applying recordkeeping metadata. Each section contains a definition, discusses why it is important for EDRMS and identifies implementation issues to be considered. Issues covered include: metadata; recordkeeping metadata; the notion of record; aggregations of records; record as a conceptual entity; entities; layers of aggregation, inheritance and extensibility.
What is metadata
Recordkeeping metadata
Notion of a record
Document or record?
Record object and metadata
Concepts of aggregation
Record as a conceptual entity
Entities
Why these entities?
Layers of aggregation
Inheritance
Extensibility
Metadata is data about data. In other words, it is a structured set of information that describes the data. Metadata includes, but is not restricted to, characteristics such as the content, context, structure, access, and availability of the data. For more information refer to the section, Glossary.
The concept of metadata is becoming increasingly familiar to people who deal with records and information. Indexes and registers are well established examples of metadata records that help with the discovery, use and management of physical records. Each specific information community has particular requirements for metadata to meet their specific information management needs. For example, the emphasis of the recordkeeping community is on authenticity, reliability, and integrity of business transactions, while the emphasis of the geospatial information community is on geographic location and characteristics of natural or constructed features and boundaries on the earth. Both these perspectives are equally valid and, while they may share some descriptive metadata, they are doing different things. So, the recordkeeping requirements for metadata are different from those of other communities focusing on different outcomes.
Our recordkeeping requirements are concerned with the creation of authentic and reliable records, and their maintenance over time.
Metadata for recordkeeping is required for a range of purposes. Among other things, metadata is used to provide information about:
Recordkeeping metadata applies to more than just records. It applies to those entities that we use to provide the context of records – for example, people associated with recordkeeping actions. See the section, Entities, for more information.
Recordkeeping metadata is particularly critical in digital environments, where the authenticity and reliability of the record is dependent on maintaining persistent logical linkages between the record object and the recordkeeping metadata.
Recordkeeping metadata is not intended to be manually created, with the exception of a small number of elements created by the user at the point of capture. Rather, the majority of recordkeeping metadata is already present in systems or applications. The recordkeeping aim is to identify this metadata, capture it, assign it standardised terms, and enable its use or reuse for management and business purposes.
It is important to note that records are not all document based. Records often consist of data managed in relational databases or as datasets. The definition of a record is very broad, it includes information received or used by an organisation in the conduct of it affairs. Records may be documents, images, sound, or data compiled, recorded or stored in written form on any material, on film, negative, tape, or other medium so as to be capable of being reproduced. An electronic record consists of both a record object and recordkeeping metadata. For further detail see the Glossary.
The focus on documents in this Technical Guide is due to the fact most electronic document and records management systems (EDRMS) manage unstructured data, such as documents, as records.
Document or record?
Records are documents created and used in the transaction of business. They are documents that are ‘locked’ into their creating context – always linked to the people and actions that created them, or caused them to be captured into the systems.
Once permanently linked to the context of their creation documents can be managed, exchanged, re-used and exploited for other purposes. This ongoing usage creates additional metadata that must be captured in addition to the context surrounding the document’s creation and capture.
Without initial capture and a continuous link to the creating context, the document will be an unreliable record and not able to be fully trusted.
Records tell the story. Sometimes a single document will be a record and tell the whole story of an event but, more usually, records consist of multiple documents that are linked together to form the history of a transaction, or the sequence of documents depicting events that led to a specific outcome. We maintain sequences of documents in various ways – by physically locating them together in a group (for example in a folder or file), or by linking them together through relationships (for example, this document led to the development of this next document, or recording the approval process associated with a specific document).
To manage electronic records (as opposed to multiple individual documents), managing these relationships and links is critical. The links sustain the telling of the story of both the business action and what has happened to the record over time. See the section, Concepts of aggregation for more information.
Record object and record metadata
In the digital world, we have to make a distinction between the thing we are managing – the bits and bytes that make up the digital content of the document or other format – and the data that surrounds that thing. In the physical world, both are collectively referred to as record. For example, the file cover contains metadata that physically encloses the contents and each document physically contains metadata such as author, date, letterhead, annotations etc. In the digital world this concept also applies, both the content and its associated metadata are necessary in order to have a record. However, in defining characteristics for recordkeeping in the digital world, we need to be able to discuss the content and the metadata separately as they may reside in different places and be managed independently. Recordkeeping requirements are needed for both. To reflect this distinction the concepts of record object and record metadata have been used in the Electronic Recordkeeping Metadata Standard and this Technical Guide.
Record object
Record object refers to the physical or logical group of data containing the digital contents of a transaction.
Record metadata
Record metadata refers to all the structured information that needs to accompany the record object to describe its characteristics and provide management controls.
For recordkeeping purposes, metadata is of two kinds:
The term record is also used with the term aggregation. We manage records at different layers of aggregation. That means that we can manage a record as a single document (or part of a document), as a sequence of documents (a file or folder), or as a series (a sequence of folders or files). Each of these is an aggregation of records. In the digital world these are logical constructs, rather than physical things, but it is an important concept which we use to apply and manage metadata. The notion of aggregation is explained further in the section, Layers of aggregation.
The conceptual approach underlying the development of the Technical Specifications is based on the notion that not everything of interest in recordkeeping needs to be thought of as a component part of a record. Rather, areas of relevance to recordkeeping can be set out as different entities. For example, a record is only one of five entities and can be managed through its relationships to other entities. The notion of entities is explained further in the section, Entities.
Recordkeeping metadata schemas have been developed using the concept of entities. Entities are physical or logical things of relevance to a particular area of interest or domain. An entity can be considered a set or a collection of objects, either physical or logical, that is then expressed further in metadata.
For recordkeeping, five relevant entities have been derived from the international standard Information and Documentation – Records management processes – Metadata for records - ISO 23081 Parts 1 and 2 (Footnote 1). These are:
This is diagrammatically represented as:
Figure 1: Main entities and their relationships (Footnote 2)
[Source: ISO 23081-1]
The definition of entities for recordkeeping is driven by the conceptual understandings of how records work and what elements are integral to understanding and managing them. Entities are conceptual groupings that behave in the same basic way. Entities define a set of metadata that can be applied consistently to everything grouped underneath (aggregations). When talking about entities, we are referring to the whole of the concept, for example, the conceptual entity record covers the notion of documents, records, items, series etc.
Why these entities?
Records: obviously for a recordkeeping metadata standard, defining records (both the record object and its metadata) is central to what we are trying to achieve. This entity defines both the record object, (be it virtual or physical) and the many relationships and logical (or physical) groupings that are used in its management. It is these groupings of records that are dealt with in the conceptual entity records.
Agents: people, various aggregations of people (individuals, workgroups, departments, organisations etc), and the roles that they are authorised to undertake, are vital to understanding and managing records. They create records, they use records, and they do things to records. We cannot interpret records without knowing about the relationship between agents and records. Agents can also be instruments or systems conducting some form of business. For example, a weather monitoring instrument can be the creator of a record, operating quite independently of a physical person. Or an application system can be an agent, in that it makes certain calculations etc from data entered into it.
Business: what is being done in the organisation is represented by functions, activities and sequences of transactions. This conceptual entity expresses what is being done. It is a critical component of the archival notion of provenance, which is a core ongoing element needed to interpret a record. In current records systems, too, knowing what business is being transacted affects how we interpret the records, how authoritative it is in a particular situation, and therefore how we need to manage it.
Mandates: these are the legislation, policies and rules establishing or governing the business, delegating authority to the agents, and requiring and regulating specific records. Mandates have always been important to understanding how and why specific records are made and kept. The documentation of mandates, however, is less developed, despite their importance to an organisation’s business. Often this is not done until it is necessary to justify disposal or appraisal decisions. In moving to the digital world, documenting the mandates up front will make the management of records more comprehensive and self-contained.
Relationship: relationships document the links between and within the entities. In our records practices to date, relationships have often been implicit and able to be derived by physical placement of documents or the knowledge of location, or roles. Archival systems, which manage records outside the creating environment, have more sophisticated understanding of relationships because they are needed to provide the ongoing links to context which changes over time. With the emergence of the digital world, the physicality is removed, so we need to make the implicit relationships which have always been there far more explicit to ensure that we can interpret and manage digital records appropriately for as long as they are required. Two major types of relationships are defined in the Technical Specifications and are explained further in the section, Understanding recordkeeping relationships.
For the purpose of recordkeeping, we need to create and maintain metadata about all of these entities. The Technical Specifications has defined a set of metadata elements which are relevant to each of these entities. To the extent that it is possible, these metadata elements have been kept standard – that is, the same elements apply to all entities. For some entities, and particularly for the record entity, at the lowest level of aggregation, we also need to define an actual physical or virtual object, so this entity contains more elements than the others.
The extent to which a specific system or application is able to manage the relevant metadata as separate and linked entities, will depend on the sophistication of the specific application. It is most common, at the moment, for EDRMS to subsume much of the metadata about other entities into the record entity, thus providing a ‘records-centric’ view where most of the metadata is regarded as a part of the records metadata, rather than as linked independent representations of metadata relating to the other entities (agents, business etc). This notion is explored further in the section, Flattening metadata entities.
Records and other entities connected to recordkeeping exist at various layers of aggregation. See the section, Concepts of aggregation for more information. They are grouped together into layers that help us to manage recordkeeping relationships.
For recordkeeping purposes, we have adopted the layers of aggregation that are presented in the international standard Information and Documentation – Records management processes – Metadata for records (AS/NZS ISO 23081-2:2007). This is a fixed encoding scheme, defined in the Technical Specifications, to be used with the metadata element ‘category’ (see Appendix C2 of the Technical Specifications).
Aggregations are often used to enable the inheritance of characteristics or behaviours to all things placed within the group. For example, security restrictions may be applied to a work group (in recordkeeping metadata terms, an aggregation of the agent entity), or to a case or project or job, rather than to a person.
Often the aggregations are hierarchical, but as indicated in the section, Configuring files/folders and items, this is not always the case. In some implementations, the aggregations are also physically presented to end users (for example, as folder structures on network drives, or as classification structures embedded into the presentation of folders in an EDRMS store), but it is worth noting that they do not have to be visually presented to users this way. Depending on individual implementation decisions, the notion of aggregations can be applied in metadata only, acting to achieve the same outcomes, but not necessarily presented visually to the end users.
The Electronic Recordkeeping Metadata Standard establishes the principle that the recordkeeping metadata schema defined in the Technical Specifications is extensible (Requirement 10). This means that additional metadata elements specific to particular organisations or implementations may be added to the established recordkeeping metadata set where necessary.
Extension is most likely to be relevant for the metadata collected at point of capture, particularly metadata related to information resource discovery. Additional elements may be needed to capture industry or business specific metadata for particular purposes. For example, a local authority may wish to document more detail on spatial metadata for properties. These elements may be drawn from an existing standard such as AS/NZS ISO 19115:2005 Geographic Information – Metadata. Bringing additional elements into the recordkeeping metadata schema from ISO 19115 will be an extension to the recordkeeping metadata schema within the Technical Specifications adopted for the specific implementation.
The variations to recordkeeping metadata introduced in individual implementations will be an organisation-specific application profile of the metadata schema. Significant care should be exercised in bringing elements from another schema into the recordkeeping schema. It is necessary to ensure that the meaning (semantics) of the element to be incorporated is fully understood and that the meaning in the recordkeeping schema is exactly the same as in the originating schema. Some further guidance on how and in what circumstances to incorporate additional elements is included in Appendix 4, Metadata Extension.
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Last updated 28 September 2009