What metadata for records and information can achieve

Effectively implementing metadata for records and information:

ensures that records and information are and remain reliable, trustworthy, identifiable, retrievable, accessible and reusable
facilitates the management of records and information over time.

Effectively implementing metadata for records and information will also assist your organisation to meet the requirements of the Standard on Records Management, which requires that records and information are:

reliable and trustworthy
identifiable, retrievable and accessible for as long as they are required
protected from unauthorised or unlawful access, destruction, loss, deletion or alteration
kept for as long as they are needed for business, legal and accountability requirements
systematically and accountably destroyed when legally appropriate to do so.

This page explains how the effective implementation of metadata can achieve this.

Use metadata to make records and information reliable and trustworthy

The Standard on Records Management requires that records and information are reliable and trustworthy. Records and information must be:

trusted as full and accurate representations of the transactions, activities or facts to which they attest
able to be depended upon in the course of subsequent transactions or activities.

Authoritative records and information are reliable and trustworthy. Authoritative records and information possess, at a minimum, the metadata described in Minimum requirements for metadata for authoritative records and information.

Metadata can also maintain a full history of record and information creation, use and management, enabling the record or information to be evaluated and trusted. This helps to ensure that records and information can be relied upon for a range of business purposes.

Example: Maintaining a record of what information was available online and when

Your organisation may need to make and keep records of when specific information was available on its website and when this information was changed or removed. Clients may rely on this information to make decisions or take actions, in which case your organisation needs to be able to prove that the information available at a certain time was current.

Carefully structuring metadata for web records is one method for keeping track of what information was available on a website and when.

Example: Maintaining a record of when an image was used

Your organisation may need to use digital images to support its business. Maintaining information about when, how and why an image was used (e.g. ‘used in annual report 2013-14’, ‘used in client newsletter August 2013’, ‘submitted as evidence of infringement recorded 23 September 2012’ etc.) provides valuable business context. This information can also support other business processes, e.g. workflows, reporting, access to information applications and copyright management.

Metadata can also track and document management actions performed on records and information. This is necessary for authenticating and protecting records and information and maintaining their integrity.

Example: Maintaining a record of how records were created and used in SharePoint

Audit logs must be configured and activated in SharePoint to ensure that records and information can be trusted and tracked. Conscious decisions must be made not to trim or delete audit metadata and to enable its storage for an appropriate period of time. If your organisation is using SharePoint to create and keep records and information you will need to have up front conversations at design or configuration for certain high risk business areas about the metadata you are going to need to keep.

Maintaining a record of the information management policies in SharePoint that provide the governance rules for specific team sites etc. is also important metadata for the administration and management of the content on those sites.

Example: Technical metadata for digitised images

If your organisation is digitising paper records, you will need to capture some technical metadata about each image and the imaging process. This type of metadata helps to support image quality assessment, ensures an image can be rendered accurately, and demonstrates the provenance of the production of an image.

The specific technical metadata requirements will be determined by the value of the records to your organisation and the likelihood of your organisation being asked to account for the accuracy of images.

For further advice on identifying and capturing metadata associated with digitisation projects, see NSW State Archives and Records’ advice on managing digitisation projects and programs.

Use metadata to enable users to find records and information

The ability to find records and information depends on metadata. Titles, subjects, tags and keywords are all examples of metadata for searching and discovery.

Example: Titling images

Many organisations manage large volumes of digital images. These may be needed for evidential purposes, and it is important to be able to identify and find images when needed. Poorly applied metadata can cause significant issues. You want to know what an image actually is and when it was taken, rather than just default or automatic titles and dates such as ‘JPEGOO1, 20150120_01’. Devices can be incorrectly configured, making automatically inherited date metadata meaningless. Making sure this metadata can be taken accurately from the image capturing device, or manually added to the system by an authorised user, will help to ensure that users can identify and find the images as needed.

Carefully structured metadata in combination with good system search functionality can help users to find and use business information quickly and easily when they need to. Using defined categories or elements (e.g. ‘Creator’, ‘Title’, ‘Date Created’ etc.) and then assigning particular terms within these facilitates specific search queries that can target relevant categories rather than needing to search across all metadata.

In enterprise content management (ECM) systems, this type of metadata can be used to improve the accessibility of records and information. For example:

An organisation could configure its ECM system to display content in order of the date of last update (e.g. present all business plans updated in the last month).
An organisation could configure its ECM to display content in terms of the cost value attached to a project (e.g. present all documentation about active projects worth more than $1.5 million).

Investing in this type of metadata definition can provide a business with the ability to leverage corporate information.

Encoding schemes structure and standardise metadata application

Poor quality metadata can significantly inhibit users’ ability to find and use records and information. You can use encoding schemes to structure and standardise metadata. More information about structuring metadata is provided in Principles for implementing metadata for records and information.

Metadata can also connect related records so that a consolidated picture of a business process, subject or matter is provided.

Metadata is crucial for records stored on removable storage media

To facilitate accessibility and long term preservation, removable storage media such as CDs and DVDs, if used, should be well described with metadata:

A label should make clear what is on a particular disk, and any software dependencies.
The disk itself should also contain all metadata necessary to explain the content, context and management of all the records contained on it.

Use metadata to facilitate interoperability and reuse

Standardised metadata is an essential prerequisite for interoperability between different information technology systems and software applications. Interoperability between systems and applications can have numerous business benefits for your organisation:

Interoperability allows systems that support different business processes to exchange information.
Interoperability facilitates successful system migrations.
Interoperability enables different organisations to cooperatively perform business processes.
Interoperability is an asset during administrative change when records and information are transferred from one organisation to another.

Shared information environments rely on clear, consistent metadata structures that enable information organisation, management and searching across diverse systems.

The NSW Government Standard Approach to Metadata establishes a standard approach to the use of metadata to support the discovery and reuse of information assets across government. The approach will support search, integration and exchange of data or information, even where agencies have implemented different metadata standards. The approach establishes baseline metadata for effective searching.

Use metadata to manage security and privacy requirements

Metadata can be used to identify records and information subject to particular security or privacy requirements so that they can be appropriately stored and protected. It can also flag any other requirements that may be necessary to protect and manage high risk records and information.

NSW State Archives and Records’ advice on how records and information management techniques and skills can contribute to information security objectives provides further guidance on:

identifying requirements for protecting records and information
applying security metadata to records and information.

Example: Personal information

Your organisation has records and information containing personal information that should be protected from unauthorised access, use, modification or disclosure. You can apply access control metadata to identify such records and information, enabling you to implement strategies for protecting them.

Further advice about privacy is available from the Information and Privacy Commission website.

Security Classification
Security Caveat
Permissions
Rights.

Information about the requirements for using each of these properties may be found in AS/NZS 5478:2015.

Use metadata to manage intellectual property requirements

Metadata can be used to record information about intellectual property rights, such as copyright and confidentiality, applying to particular records and information. Proactively creating and managing this metadata can help to ensure that your organisation complies with its responsibilities in relation to intellectual property rights.

NSW State Archives and Records’ advice on managing digital images provides further guidance on associating metadata with images.

AS/NZS 5478:2015 Recordkeeping Metadata Property Reference Set (RMPRS) provides a reference set of recordkeeping metadata to support systems interoperability and records sustainability. This set includes the Rights property, which can be used to facilitate the appropriate management and use of records with particular access and use restrictions. Information about the requirements for using this property may be found in AS/NZS 5478:2015.

Use metadata to preserve records and information

Within a well specified system, metadata can be used as a tool to proactively plan for and then perform on-going accessibility and preservation activities such as migration.

Metadata can document software and hardware dependencies for records and information. This helps to manage the vulnerabilities which occur when software and hardware are changed.

Metadata can also be used to tag records in vulnerable and unusual formats, as these may require specific management in order to be accessible and useable for as long as they are needed.

Example: Audio visual recordings

Digital audio and video formats are subject to rapid change, and technological obsolescence is a real threat. Your organisation may decide to include a review date in the metadata for digital audio visual recordings so that it is reminded about the need to monitor the condition and useability of the recordings and if refreshment or replication is needed.

For further information about using metadata to describe and manage audio visual recordings, see Digitisation of analogue audio and video.

Metadata can be used to identify records and information of long term value to your organisation and enable these to be flagged for priority management. If your organisation knows which records and information are of long term value you can apply more extensive technical and preservation metadata to them to help facilitate their management.

Use metadata to automate the sentencing of records and information

Metadata can be used to automate the sentencing of records and information in digital systems. For example:

You can configure an electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) to sentence records when they are captured by building in certain functionality.
You can use information management policies in enterprise content management (ECM) systems to automatically apply disposal rules and disposal authorisation workflows to automate the destruction of content. In this example you would need to flag that this workflow metadata then becomes a really important record that needs to be managed and possibly kept through system change, in order to account for the management of that information.

Case study: Sentencing human resources records

The NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC) conducted a project to digitise incoming human resources records, including records documenting the recruitment and management of teachers and other DEC employees. The project team determined that capturing the date of birth of teachers and employees was vital to the ongoing management of these records and would ensure that DEC kept these records for as long as required (retention periods for these records depend on knowing the date of birth). The team implemented strategies to automate the capture of this metadata.

See further information about this project.

AS/NZS 5478:2015 Recordkeeping Metadata Property Reference Set (RMPRS) provides a reference set of recordkeeping metadata to support systems interoperability and records sustainability. This set includes the Disposal property, which can be used to record information about the disposal actions that relate to specific records and information. This property includes five sub-properties:

Retention and Disposal Authority
Disposal Class ID
Disposal Action
Disposal Trigger Date
Disposal Action Date.

Information about the requirements for using each of these properties may be found in AS/NZS 5478:2015.

Published February 2015 / Revised November 2015

Recordkeeping Advice

Metadata for Records & Information