The purposes of standardised recordkeeping metadata are quite varied and
should include the following:
Allowing the unique identification of records;
Facilitating the authentication of records;
Documenting the structure and fixing the content of records;
Allowing records to be linked to relevant contextual documentation concer
ning provenancial and functional interrelationships in order to preserve the
meaning of those records over time and beyond their context of creation;
Administering terms and conditions of access and retention/disposal;
Documenting use history and other recordkeeping processes;
Enabling the discovery, retrieval and delivery of records; and
Restricting unauthorised use.
One of the notable features of the integration of current and archival
recordkeeping through the deployment of metadata is that, in the words of
Chris Hurley:
the distinctions which were made between arrangement and description
and other archival operations (survey, appraisal, storage and access)
disappear. In a post-custodial world it is clear that through archival descrip
tion [and metadata deployment] archivists will be able to carry out those
activities that are particularly theirs.8
Another interesting feature of the Australian interest in the possibilities offered
by recordkeeping metadata is that it is no longer necessary to find suitable
aggregations of records such as series that can act as the locus of records descrip
tion. If anything, the emergence of electronic records has shifted the descriptive
focus back to the individual record. Aggregations such as virtual files, series and
recordkeeping systems are unquestionably still an essential aspect of the contex
tual knowledge that is needed to fully understand records and, as such, need to
be documented using metadata. But the use of the series as the locus of descrip
tion is no longer an essential defining feature of Australian approaches to
intellectual control. Nevertheless, while the series maybe diminishing in
significance, Peter Scott's major contribution to archival thinking, the need to
link descriptions of records to contextual metadata throughout the entire
records continuum, remains.
What about descriptive standards?
It is the emerging view in Australia that the objectives traditionally served by
'archival description' are but a subset of the broader set of objectives served by
continuum-based recordkeeping metadata. This does not, however, obviate the
need for standards -indeed, if anything it strengthens the case for standards.
Nor do we in Australia believe that we will need to jettison our tradition of
archival control.
Instead, we view the emergence of recordkeeping metadata as merely the latest
development in a continuously evolving set of Australian strategies for the
pursuit of better intellectual control of records. We believe that the system
developed by Peter Scott provides us with a sound basis for the pursuit of user-
friendly continuum-based metadata regimes. We must not forget that new
fangled electronic metadata is not really all that different to the old fashioned
metadata that existed in registry and archival systems -the major difference is
that in the future all such metadata will be linked in the one integrated
automated system.
I do not, however, wish to underestimate the challenges that still await us.
Integrating old and new systems of intellectual control will be a non-trivial chal
lenge, even if they are both based on a similar set of philosophical foundations.
An even bigger challenge will be resolving the tension between those of us who
still prefer static documentary or post-hoc bibliographic representations of
records and those of us who prefer the dynamic metadata regimes such as are
currently being explored in Australia. The Australian approach does not preclude
using metadata to produce traditional bibliographic descriptions of records. But
the bibliographic approach is so patently unsuited to meeting the imperatives of
the electronic world that the prognosis, as I see it, consists of two possibilities,
painful readjustment on the one hand or oblivion and antiquarian irrelevance
on the other.
A proposed Australian standard for the intellectual
control of records
With all of this in mind, the Australian Committee on Archival Descriptive
Standards has set itself the objective of devising an Australian Standard for the
Intellectual Control of Records. This Standard, which we envisage will be a com
panion Standard to the Australian Standard for Records Management (AS4390),
may perhaps be a container architecture that provides an integrated and theore
tically consistent framework for the best practice application of a variety of com
patible and interoperable descriptive metadata schemas.
The new Australian Standard will encompass the entire records continuum.
Drawing on the results of the Monash University Recordkeeping Metadata
Research Project, it should provide a standardised means of creating and dynami
cally maintaining recordkeeping metadata over time, both at item and aggregate
level. It should provide guidance on the linking of record descriptions to func
tion, activity, creator and recordkeeping process metadata.
As far as possible the new standard will endeavour to be compatible/interopera
ble with such existing international and national standards as ISAD (G), ISAAR
(CPF), MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing) and the Australian Government
Locator Service (AGLS) metadata standard.9 Because we wish the Standard to be
one that practitioners can both relate to and aspire towards, it should endeavour
DE KWALITEIT VAN HET ARCHIEF EN HET ARCHIEFBEHEER
8 C. Hurley, "Standards, Standardisation, and Documentation" in Archives at the Centre. Proceedings of the
Australian Society of Archivists Conference Alice Springs 24-25 May 1996 (Canberra, 1997), p. 64.
140
ADRIAN CUNNINGHAM /DYNAMIC DESCRIPTIONS
9 A. Cunningham, The Australian Government Locator Service: Enabling Seamless Online Access to Government,
available at http:/www.naa.gov.au/govserv/agls
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