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Specify and apply recordkeeping metadata

What is recordkeeping metadata?

Recordkeeping metadata is data that facilitates the use and management of records. Particularly in electronic applications, metadata can be a key means of improving your system and helping it to meet recordkeeping requirements.

Recordkeeping metadata is a tool that enables you to describe records, people and business activities in a suitable amount of detail to ensure:

  • better information accessibility
  • improved records management, and
  • greater accountability in business operations.

InformationTip: Metadata can be applied in a variety of forms
Remember that metadata can be employed in both electronic and paper based recordkeeping environments. How you deploy it depends on your business needs.

Recordkeeping metadata requirements

Any recordkeeping metadata you decide to implement should comply with State Records' Standard on digital recordkeeping. This standard identifies the metadata elements that must be employed within recordkeeping systems. It is a useful tool that can assist with your metadata implementation. The NSW Recordkeeping Metadata Technical Specification provides a more detailed explanation of recordkeeping metadata and the rules for its implementation.
See Recordkeeping in Brief 18: Introducing recordkeeping metadata for more information.

InformationTip: Metadata can be scalable
With recordkeeping metadata, it is rarely one size fits all. You may require a range of metadata strategies to meet the needs of your business environment. Remember that a metadata strategy can cover a section or part of your organisation's business or the whole organisation. It can relate to one or more of your functions. Consider the disparate needs of your business areas, your variety of staff. Metadata is a flexible tool. Be sure to implement it in a flexible manner.

DIRKS and recordkeeping metadata

The DIRKS Manual can be used to develop metadata strategies that meet your organisational needs, constraints and objectives and to implement these strategies in effective and accountable recordkeeping systems.

You may choose to do a specific DIRKS project that is focussed only on metadata implementation, but it is more likely that metadata will be considered as an integral aspect of broader DIRKS projects you undertake.

The steps below flag the various different points at which you may want to consider metadata and its implementation during your DIRKS project.

Identifying your recordkeeping metadata requirements

Undertaking Steps A-C of the DIRKS methodology can help you to identify the types of requirements your organisation has concerning recordkeeping metadata, or how recordkeeping metadata can be used to help you meet other requirements.

To understand your organisation's metadata needs, you will need to start by conducting some broad research into your organisation, how it operates and its broad technological framework. The sources in Step A will help you to understand what business is performed in the organisation, broad legal requirements affecting this business and the stakeholders that impact upon your business operations. It also tells you about risks and organisational information needs, some of which you can addressed through appropriate metadata implementation.

If you are intending to develop a metadata scheme for one function or business unit at a time, you should still broadly analyse your business in Step A to get an overview of operations, but you can start to concentrate more on those sources that relate to the particular function or business unit you wish to focus on.

In Step B you focus on your organisation's business activity and how this activity is performed. The analysis in Step B allows you to start defining:

  • what areas of your business might require more detailed metadata than others
  • the scope and content of metadata schemes, and
  • the ways metadata might be used to meet business objectives.

The business classification scheme, a key product of your Step B research, is a tool that can be used to populate certain values in your metadata scheme. Products created from the business classification scheme, such as a keyword thesaurus or a retention and disposal authority, can also be used to populate your metadata scheme.

In Step C you identify the recordkeeping requirements affecting your organisation. In relation to metadata, these requirements may be of two types:

  • those that specify particular metadata requirements - such as 'name of complainant must be captured with every complaint received'. These types of requirements point to specific metadata elements that you should be able to provide within your systems.
  • those that can be satisfied, completely or partially, through the use of metadata - such as 'licence applications must be retained for fifty years'. Metadata can be used to facilitate the management and appropriate disposal of records to help to ensure that they are retained for as long as required.

Compiling a list of the recordkeeping requirements affecting your organisation as a whole, or each specific business unit, will provide you with a means to develop a comprehensive metadata strategy for your organisation. It will identify how and where metadata should be applied to help you meet your business needs.

InformationTip: Talk to staff about their metadata requirements
Talking to action officers about their business needs and information requirements is a very useful way to identify recordkeeping requirements concerning metadata. Staff will know the types of information that will facilitate their jobs or enable them to access information better. Use this feedback to help identify the metadata that should be captured to support a range of business activities.

QuestionsExample: Long term retention
Have you identified a requirement to keep business records for long periods of time? If your records are in electronic form, maintaining these records for the ten, twenty or fifty years that may be required by legislation or to meet business needs, can be a difficult process. In this situation, you could look at utilising metadata as a means of helping you to meet this requirement. You could use metadata to flag those records requiring ongoing migration or to initiate the types of preservation acts they require. Metadata could also be used to document any preservation activities performed upon the records as part of your ongoing accessibility strategy.

Improving metadata creation and management

Doing Steps A-C and knowing the types of requirements relating to metadata, or those that can be satisfied by using metadata, is important.

Steps D-G of the DIRKS methodology can help you to apply this knowledge. These steps of the methodology can help you to:

  • determine whether your existing systems enable your metadata requirements to be met
  • employ a range of strategies to ensure adequate metadata is made and managed to support your recordkeeping operations
  • undertake system design work where necessary, to help you meet your metadata requirements, and
  • implement metadata effectively across your organisation.

In Step D you assess the capacities of your existing systems to meet your recordkeeping requirements. Including metadata analysis in your Step D assessments is important to determine the efficacy of your current metadata capture and management and to establish whether this can be improved.

To assess the metadata in your business systems, you need to have a good understanding of how business is currently transacted in your organisation. What technology is used, how is it used? What are the rules and procedures that people are following? Have problems in interpreting or using records been identified that you can use metadata to rectify?

Within your business systems, it is important to know the metadata they contain and how this metadata is being managed.

InformationTip: How to identify metadata
You can identify the metadata captured within a system by examining the system itself, by reading system documentation, data dictionaries and data models. Staff using the system will also be able to provide you with an understanding of the types of data they create and manage about records in their daily business operations.

QuestionsExample: Questions to ask about metadata capture

Some questions you may want to ask during your system assessment to determine whether your system's metadata creation and management is appropriate include:

  • is disposal metadata captured to describe the retention periods applicable to the record/system?
  • is access metadata captured to describe who can or cannot access the record/system?
  • is record title information provided to facilitate searching?
  • is it possible to determine who created a record?
  • is it possible to determine the business transaction that generated the record?
  • is an audit trail that documents when a record was accessed, registered, sentenced etc created?
  • does each record have a unique identifier?
  • is a record linked to its metadata or is the metadata maintained in a separate database?
  • can the link between a record and its metadata be maintained through system migration?
  • do system rules prevent metadata alteration or update?
  • if metadata is maintained in paper form, can it be logically related to appropriate paper or electronic records?
  • where relevant, can the system capture structural metadata, such as data and media format, compression methods, hardware and software dependencies and description of standards used?
InformationTip: Metadata can be stored at different levels

Depending on the type of system you are assessing, metadata may be captured to describe:

  • individual records (such as a title or unique identifier for an individual record)
  • groups of records (such as disposal rules applied at the file level), or
  • systems (such as access rules applied to a whole personnel records database).

Each of these options can be appropriate, but you need to determine the levels and types of metadata that will work best to meet your recordkeeping requirements.

If, at the end of your Step D assessment, you determine that your existing practices, systems and structures are currently not enabling you to create and manage the metadata you require, Steps E - G can help you to design or redesign systems and practices that enable you to generate and maintain the metadata you require to meet your business requirements.

Once you have determined what metadata you should be capturing and examined the capacities of your current systems, in Step E you can examine the policy, design, standards and implementation tactics to determine the combination of these strategies that will best enable you to implement your metadata strategy across your organisation.

Based on your assessments in Step C: Identification of recordkeeping requirements and Step D: Assessment of existing systems you may have determined that different systems in your organisation require different metadata solutions. You may therefore develop quite a mixed approach in Step E, utilising policy and design based approaches, to ensure all the gaps you identified in Step D are able to be rectified.

QuestionsExample: Develop different requirements for different areas of your business
In one business area that operates in a high risk environment you may decide that a system needs to be redesigned to enable more metadata capture and to potentially automate much of this capture.
In another business area where the technical infrastructure is adequate but metadata capture is poor, you may decide to implement the policy tactic and establish rules that specify exactly what metadata people need to capture about each of the business transactions they document.

Step F: Design of a recordkeeping system

If, in Step F, you decide to design technical components of your systems, metadata will be a key component of your system design work. If you are working with IT or systems staff to develop your technical components, you will find that they generally have a good understanding of metadata and will provide you with some good ideas about how it can be used to best affect within your systems.

Part of effective system design is determining how the metadata you will require is to be generated. There are numerous options open to you. Metadata can be:

  • input by staff
  • automatically captured by system as a part of business transactions
  • automatically created by system according to rules established within it (such as sequential file numbering, automatic capture of audit log details, automatic attribution of disposal class according to classified title applied to file)
  • drawn from recordkeeping tools such as disposal authorities, thesauri – it is very important to have such tools to help populate your metadata fields and automate records management activities
  • derived from security classification scheme employed within your organisation
  • obtained from IT system controls, inherited from logins etc
  • taken from dates and times inherited from system clocks

Metadata can be stored in documents, databases, distributed systems, paper form – a range of different options – so consider that which is best for your needs and what works best with your existing technologies.

A range of other guidance about incorporating recordkeeping metadata in your recordkeeping system design is included in Step F: Design of a recordkeeping system.

InformationTip: Try to automate metadata capture
If you are designing your system to capture better metadata, try to automate your metadata capture as much as possible. Look at the business environment surrounding your system, the recordkeeping tools you have developed and data that is maintained in other systems. Try to see where you can automatically extract or derive data from, to save users from having to enter significant amounts of information.

If, in Step E: Identification of strategies for recordkeeping you decided not to develop technical components of systems (ie decided not to adopt the design tactic), in Step F you can design approaches using the policy and implementation tactics to help ensure that metadata is better made and managed in your organisation. For example you can develop:

  • policy or procedural documentation that require staff capture adequate metadata and explain specifically how they achieve this, or
  • training programs to show staff how to use existing technical applications and recordkeeping tools, such as disposal authorities or thesauri, to create adequate metadata within systems.

InformationTip: Be aware in your system design work that your organisation's metadata may need to evolve through time
The metadata your organisation creates should evolve and be added to through time. Be aware of this when designing metadata systems, or liaising with software vendors over system design. A static, fixed metadata description will only serve a limited number of business needs. If your organisation has strong accountability requirements, can an audit trail of record use be compiled and maintained about high risk records? If your systems automatically trigger record migration operations, can documentation of these operations be captured within the system?

Step G: Implementation of a recordkeeping system

In Step G, you implement your metadata strategies in your organisation. Depending on the nature of your metadata project, only a small amount of implementation work may be required. If you have designed your system so that your metadata capture is significantly automated, you will need to apply the new system, and inform staff of its new capacities.

If you are relying on staff to provide much of the metadata for you, you will need to implement a training program and/or the policies and guidelines you have developed to clearly inform staff about the metadata they will be required to capture and the ways in which they can do this.

InformationTip: Be aware of the training that may be required to support metadata implementation
Certain forms of metadata creation can be complex, so ensure your staff have the knowledge they need to accomplish this.
For example, if staff are expected to use recordkeeping tools, such as disposal authorities or thesauri, to create adequate metadata within systems, they may require specialised training. If accuracy is crucial to your work, special emphasis on the importance of clear, consistent metadata creation may also need to be made.

Reviewing your recordkeeping metadata

Ongoing monitoring and review of your metadata requirements is important to the success of your metadata strategy - Step H. You may want to assess how metadata is being captured, to ensure this is efficient, test the security of metadata or examine the capacity of metadata to be migrated through system change.

Liaison with staff is a key means by which you can determine the adequacy of your metadata capture and whether it needs to be improved to better meet your recordkeeping needs.

Further information

Recordkeeping metadata is referenced throughout the DIRKS Manual (particularly in Step D and Step F), so read the manual for more guidance.

For further information you can also read State Records' New South Wales Recordkeeping Metadata Standard.