New minimum requirements for metadata for authoritative records and information November 24, 2015

In February this year, State Records published some advice on metadata for records and information. This advice gives an overview of metadata for records and information, establishes some principles for implementing metadata for records and information, and discusses what metadata for records and information can achieve.

We have revised and updated this advice, and included a new section: Minimum requirements for metadata for authoritative records and information.

The international standard on records management, ISO 15489, defines authoritative records as being authentic and reliable, having integrity, and being useable.

Organisations can rely on authoritative records and information to function as trustworthy evidence of their business transactions.

The new minimum requirements state that in order to be authoritative, records and information must possess metadata recording:

  • a description of the content of records and information
  • the structure of records and information
  • the business context in which records and information were created or received and used
  • relationships with other records, information and metadata
  • business actions and events
  • information that may be needed to retrieve and present records and information.

This metadata is the minimum necessary for authoritative records and information. Individual organisations may identify the need to create and capture additional metadata to ensure that records and information are authentic and reliable, have integrity, and are useable.

This minimum metadata must be configured in systems and carried forward through system changes in order to sustain records immediately and through time.

The minimum metadata set can be applied to entire systems (such as transactional systems in which all the records and information have the same management requirements) or to individual records or groupings of records (such as files in an electronic document and records management system (EDRMS)).

Many traditional recordkeeping systems, such as EDRMS, may capture and keep the minimum metadata for records and information by default. For other systems, your organisation may need to determine how it will capture and keep the minimum metadata, and at what level this will be done.

We want to hear from you!

In order to make our advice as useful as possible for NSW public offices, we would like to publish some case studies of metadata implementations. If your organisation is willing to share its experiences, please contact us.

Image credit: Lorenzo Perdigiorno – “Self portraiture + metadata” (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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