consideration of multiple possible approaches to answering a question such as 'what
is information?' immediately come to mind-but metadata has not received the
same treatment in any information field. As with the term 'information',
'metadata' is both ubiquitous and applied in so many ways in this digital age that
without conceptual analysis and close operational definition, while it may indeed be
intuitively understood it is essentially expressively useless, hence Eno's 'wink'.
This paper addresses what is to be gained from such a discussion from the
perspective of archival science and other recordkeeping fields, which play crucial
cultural, memory, evidentiary and information roles in society. It argues that
philosophically and phenomenologically such an examination is important
because, visibly or invisibly, metadata is a factor that is at work in all systems and
services that support such roles, and is also embedded in and envelopes every type of
informational, evidentiary and cultural resource with which these fields engage. It
briefly reviews the history of metadata in archival science and recordkeeping more
broadly. From there it contemplates, with illustrations, the concept of metadata in
terms of its various and expanding conceptualizations and instantiations, as well
as some ethical, political and emerging concerns.
Metadata is not a New Phenomenon
Metadata is a relative neologism with respect to the inherited canon of archival
principles and ideas. That canon was largely formulated in the nineteenth and first
half of the twentieth century and, while increasingly challenged philosophically and
practically, its strictures about archival arrangement and description continue to
dominate professional thought and practice (Gilliland-Swetland, 2000). Metadata,
however, is a broader concept than simply arrangement and/or description, even
though the term may sometimes be used synonymously by those engaged in
description and other information organization activities. In the archival field it
came into currency in connection with the management of born-digital or
'electronic' records, but it would be a mistake to consider it to be something new
that emerged in the digital era. In fact, metadata in various complex and evolving
instantiations have always been inherent to the nature of records as they have been
to any other kind of information or cultural object. And as already mentioned, the
exploitation and application of metadata are also fundamental to the entire body of
practices of archival science and recordkeeping more broadly, including the design
of systems that create records and the structure or form of those records, as well as
their appraisal and preservation (Bearman, 1989, p. 37).
The Enlightenment is often looked to as the impetus behind the development of
systematic knowledge organization schemes in different disciplines. However
archaeological and historical evidence indicate that keepers of records and
prototypical archives developed and implemented bureaucratic organizational
schemes and formulaic documentary structures in even the earliest days of written
recordkeeping in the Fertile Crescent (Gilliland, 2011). Roman systems of
registering and abstracting documents were precursors of registries implemented
across subsequent empires of colonial powers, mercantile enterprises, and the
reaches of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Registries were integral to
organizational workflow and control, and ensured the arrangement and description
of bureaucratic and religious records through registration and classification,
identified versions of records, and tracked their subsequent circulation. Latterday
instantiations of registries are still widely in use around the world in physical and
digital forms and have inspired many of the requirements and approaches that are
embedded in the current ISO recordkeeping metadata standards.
Jacob von Rammingen, of the German tradition, wrote in 1570 what is considered to
be one of the first treatises in archival science or Wissenschaft. He asserted that no
two registries would likely be the same and underscored the complexities of the
entities, tools and activities associated with archival organization:
"In our registry we need the following genera. First, one for what is
received, and one for what is emitted. And also for notes and
announcements. Then for copies, originals, drafts and abstracts. Then for
comments and supplements. Finally for indexes and repertories, and also
for securities and responses. As for other books and registers the zealous
and industrious analyzer and segregator will, in their eases, quickly realize
what books and registers he needs for this." (p. 97)
However, with concern for his own job security, teaching income and potentially
personal safety if the records in his charge were to become too easy to identify or
locate, he refused to divulge much more detail in the treatise, stating that "Anyone
wishing more information about this can pay the tuition fee, and then learn it by
seeing with his own eyes, and hear the oral teaching of these secret 'kabbalistic'
traditions." (p. 98). Head, in his study of early modern archives in Switzerland, has
found a "seeming progression from listing to mapping to taxonomy" (2016, p. 433)
in organizational approaches. His research suggests, in line with Rammingen's
observation, that a heterogeneity of descriptive approaches were in play during this
period, and he cautions against over-generalizing their nature. Other historians who
have examined descriptive systems during and after the Reformation also note
divergences and overt politics of organizational schemes connected to how archives
were being used to support the Protestant and Catholic movements, institutions and
theologies of the time (Head, 2010). For example, cosmographers in the sixteenth
and seventeenth century Spanish court were charged with devising data collection
forms and cosmographic schemes that could incorporate the new knowledge and
natural history being encountered as Spain built its empire in the so-called Indies
into existing Catholic cosmography. These structures and ontologies became the
metadata that governed the nature and the interpretation of the records that would
be perused by the king and eventually gathered in the extensive Archives of the
Indies (Portuondo, 2009).
Contemporary Constructions of Archival and Recordkeeping Metadata
When the term 'metadata' was first used, by the geospatial, data management and
systems design communities, it referred to the internal and external documentation
necessary for the identification, representation, interoperability, technical
management, performance and use of data contained in information or other
automated systems (Gilliland, 2016, p. 1). By the 1990s the term was widely
adopted by professionals engaged in the organization of information and especially
in bibliographic description to refer to catalog records and other forms of value-
added resource description that they were creating. More than a case of 'old wine in
new bottles,' it provided a broader and more interdisciplinary way to conceptualize
their work and the new standards and other descriptive tools they were developing
in the digital and networked era. Since the development of international standards
archives in liquid times
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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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