Recordkeeping professionals now recognise the value of metadata as a tool for ensuring reliable recordkeeping in electronic environments, particularly in eBusiness and eGovernment. However, the implementation of recordkeeping metadata standards is proving to be problematic: tools for automatic metadata creation are inadequate, and current systems environments generally do not support the sharing of metadata between business systems for multiple purposes.

This research project will develop a proof of concept prototype to demonstrate how standards-compliant metadata can be created once in particular application environments, then used many times to meet a range of business purposes. The prototype will be implemented in a test-bed site to provide a model for best practice.

Details of the Clever Recordkeeping Metadata Project.

The Recordkeeping Metadata Project aims to develop a recordkeeping metadata framework that will support business, social and cultural needs for:

• The creation and management of electronic records in networked environments
• Making records accessible with an array of other genres of recorded information through common user interfaces
• Sustaining environments in which electronic records can continue to function over time and space:
• as evidence for governance, accountability, memory and identity purposes
• as sources of value-added information - information that can be accessed, exploited and reused for reasons unrelated to the organisational or social activity they document.

What is Recordkeeping Metadata?

Recordkeeping metadata is defined broadly to include all standardised information that identifies, authenticates, describes, manages and makes accessible documents created in the context of social and organisational activity.

Details of the Recordkeeping Metadata Project

The Teaching Innovations Fund is concerned with the internationalisation of subject content of the recordkeeping specialisation in the Master of Information Management with reference to the global context of the students' learning environment.

The recordkeeping program is taught within that course in addition to being a professional program available to undergraduates as a specialisation in the third year of the Bachelor of Information Management and Systems. Accreditation of the program from the two professional societies involved in recordkeeping: the Records Management Association of Australia and the Australian Society of Archivists is currently pending. The recordkeeping programs of the School are both nationally and internationally recognised as leading edge education for recordkeeping professionals.

The program includes a core of four professional subjects which are available both in distance education mode and on campus. These subjects have been tailored for delivery into workplace-based training and education programs and have been successfully delivered in distance education mode to over one hundred staff of the National Archives of Australia.

The InterPARES Project (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) is a major international research initiative in which academics, national archival institutions and private industry representatives will collaborate to develop the theoretical and methodological knowledge required for the permanent preservation of authentic records created in electronic systems. The InterPARES Project will collaborate with information technology experts to devise the methodology required to implement these requirements. Based on the project's theoretical and methodological findings, its many international participants will work together to draft model strategies, policies and standards designed to ensure the permanent preservation of authentic electronic records. Associate Professor Sue McKemmish is Chair of the Australian Research Team participating in this project.

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Authorised by Head, School of Information Management and Systems. Caution.
Maintained by Records Continuum Research Group.

Last updated 5 January 2000.