bureaucratic requirements (e.g., ensuring accountability, transparency and
effectiveness) or cultural, scholarly or even human and civil rights imperatives when
resources are constrained. While ethical considerations regarding metadata in the
twentieth century might also have dwelled on how to document and control levels of
access, meet privacy requirements, redact content and implement other privacy and
security controls, more recently professional debate has centred around issues of
equity, power, voice and vulnerability, raising questions such as what is authoritative
metadata? Who gets to create metadata? Whose interests are represented in the
design of metadata standards and systems that support metadata creation? Whose
words are used in metadata and who has the power to name? Whose presence in the
records should be emphasized and who should speak for that presence? How much
metadata should be created and at what levels of granularity (since granularity often
determines utility for particular uses)? For whom and for what purposes should
value-added metadata be created? And can or should metadata be proprietary?
Another important area of concern focuses on disinformation and the use of
metadata deliberately to mislead or to promote particular political narrative,
especially in the digital environment.
A number of more applied ethical questions lie at the heart of current metadata
practices in the archival and recordkeeping fields and challenge how they will move
toward more accessible, equitable and networked digital and global futures. For
example, if, in its simplest construction, metadata can be considered to provide
essential context for records and their use, where does this context begin and end (if
at all) and how do professionals manage it to ensure that it does not eventually
overwhelm the record or records to which it pertains? How might expanded
conceptualisations of key metadata elements such as provenance play in pluralizing
understandings of and acknowledging rights in records? What rights do those who
are implicated in the record have as to what metadata is captured, assigned,
compiled and publicly disseminated about them? And what types of metadata and
metadata-based tools should be made available to the public to assist in metadata
compilation and manipulation within and across archival holdings?
It is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt to try to answer these questions, but it
is interesting to note that we can see ethical concerns surfacing, even as early as von
Rammingen's treatise. In what he views to be a decadent era, he is clear about the
ethics underlying the work of organizing the registry-that it can hold people
accountable by exposing or detecting incorrect or falsified information and records;
and that it can ensure that those who have lost, because of wars or suffering,
relevant charters, can still recover the textual content of those documents through
the registry, thus evidencing their rights (pp. 7-8).
Final Thoughts
Metadata are endless, as are archives. Their extent is only limited by humanity's
resources, technical capabilities, imagination, and will. No universal hard and fast
distinction between record and metadata has ever been possible to make-and it is
not so much that this is different from the cases of other information objects and
professions so much as it is something of which archivists and other recordkeepers
are deeply conscious. Non-digital practice and other information fields can all
benefit from applying a close analysis of metadata. Given the centrality of metadata
to archival science and recordkeeping theory and practice, however, and its
particular relevance to the central concepts of 'context' and the creation and
preservation and (re)production of 'evidence' across time, it is essential that these
fields engage in such a contemplation and in doing so, have the potential to
contribute provocative and far-reaching philosophical work on the subject to the
broader informational, cultural, juridical and bureaucratic realms within which
they are situated.
Glossary
Recordkeeping: Encompasses all aspects of the creation, management and use of
records and their associated metadata across space, time, agents, mandates,
motivations and manifestations. It thus subsumes those aspects traditionally
considered to be the professional field of archival science or archivistics as well as
records management. Since this is not always understood as such outside
continuum contexts this essay uses the construction (really a misconstruction)
'archival science and recordkeeping' to underscore that it is taking a broad view on
metadata phenomena.
Records continuum: "Encompasses a range of intertwined recordkeeping and
archival processes and activities carried out by records managers and archivists for
current, regulatory, and historical recordkeeping purposes. These purposes include
the roles that recordkeeping plays in and through space and time in governance and
accountability, remembering and forgetting, shaping identity and providing value-
added sources of information. In classificatory terms 'recordkeeping' in this usage
subsumes records management and archival administration. It also encompasses
the personal and corporate recordkeeping activities undertaken by individuals in
their everyday lives, in families, work or community groups, and in organisations of
all kinds" (McKemmish, Upward Reed, 2009, 4448)
archives in liquid times
224
anne j. gilliland 'the wink that's worth a thousand words': a contemplation on
the nature of metadata and metadata practices in the archival world
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