for archival description, the archival profession has interacted increasingly closely
with the worlds of both bibliographic and museum description.
Taking both of these trajectories into account, multiple ways have been proposed,
therefore, to identify and operationalize metadata in information and cultural
heritage contexts (e.g., administrative, descriptive, preservation, technical, use) and
to characterize it (e.g., source of metadata, method of metadata creation, nature of
metadata, metadata status, structure, semantics and level) (Gilliland, 2016).
Archival and recordkeeping preoccupations today engage explicitly or implicitly with
all of these ways. Distinctively, archivists and other recordkeepers are concerned
with bureaucratic accountability and transparency, as well as with the preservability
of legal, historical and cultural evidence. These concerns set a particularly high bar
for the continual management of trustworthy metadata necessary to audit
recordkeeping systems and practices and validate and (re)produce records.
Nevertheless, despite archival science being a field that is given to reflecting upon
and developing its theoretical base, the extent to which archives and recordkeeping
were overtly engaged with metadata beyond description was not appreciated until
the archival science and other recordkeeping fields had to confront the management
of electronic records. When records were predominantly in paper form, their
manifestations and nature seemed to be more self-apparent and were less subject to
conceptual analysis about their identity and constitution. One important exception
to this assertion should be noted, however, and that is the diplomatic analysis of the
genesis, form, transmission and documentary context of individual documents.
The development and application of diplomatic techniques, notably in and after the
seventeenth century, initially sought to determine the authenticity of mediaeval
charters and thus the validity of legal claims contained therein. In the nineteenth
century diplomatic techniques became more specialized as they expanded to support
the historical analysis and authentication of many other common and emerging
types of records though an examination of elements such as the acts, actors, form,
dates, copies and versions, and seals associated with the document in hand in
addition to the likely veracity of the information that it contained. Diplomatic ideas
and techniques were extended to twentieth century documents (Carucci, 1987) and
by the end of the twentieth century by Duranti in the form of 'contemporary
archival diplomatics' to address aggregations of records (i.e., rather than individual
documents or instances of record types) as well as records that had been born-digital
(1998).
With electronic records a key consideration is that there is not necessarily any
physical object in hand to manage, describe or make available, and sometimes there
is only the capacity to render or recreate a record virtually:
"[Electronic records] are [often] heterogeneous distributed objects
comprising selected data elements that are pulled together by activity-
related metadata such as audit trails, reports, and views through a process
prescribed by the business function for a purpose that is juridically
required." (Gilliland-Swetland Eppard, 2000)
In other words, they are intellectually complex and contingent objects to identify
and move forward through time and migrations without compromising their
authenticity, and thus need to be described as a conceptual as well as a virtual object,
and in relation to all of their contingencies. The first usages and glossary definitions
of 'metadata' in the field unsurprisingly therefore did not derive from how metadata
was being conceived in the information organization fields. Rather they emanated
out of understandings that had developed from analyzing and (re)designing
government electronic recordkeeping systems in the 1980s so that they could
capture and exploit both static and dynamic process metadata necessary for
evidentiary, accountability and preservation purposes (United Nations ACCIS,
1990). In 1993 Wallace argued that a metadata systems approach could provide
solutions to many of the problems that had been identified with managing records
produced by electronic systems. He synthesized many of the advantages of this
approach that had been recognized by those engaged in electronic records
management:
"(1) capture and preservation of records context (evidence);
(2) preservation of systems and record structure;
(3) generation and retention of relevant descriptive information;
(4) incorporation of appraisal and disposition data;
(5) life cycle management of records;
(6) preservation and migration of system functionality; and
(7) creation of inventory/locator systems for organizational information
resources" (p. 88).
Wallace subsequently also noted the definition used by the 1989 Society of American
Archivists (SAA) Working Group on Standards for Archival Description:
"[the] process of capturing, collating, analyzing, and organizing and
information that serves to identify, manage, locate, and interpret the
holdings of archival institutions and explain the contexts and records
systems from which those holdings were selected" (Wallace, 1996, p.
17-18).
He argued for the potential for the automated creation and capture of descriptive
metadata out of appropriately designed electronic recordkeeping systems, thus
beginning the embedding of a metadata consciousness across all areas of archival
and recordkeeping activity in order to support "record identification, access,
understandability, interpretation, authenticity, and ongoing management"
(Wallace, 1993, p. 100; Wallace, 1996, p. 18; Hedstrom, 1993).
The UBC and InterPARES research projects (Duranti, 1997; Interpares.org;
Interparestrust.org) have applied Duranti's diplomatics approach to delineate
mechanisms for ensuring the reliability and authenticity of electronic records,
focusing on intrinsic and extrinsic elements of documentary form, annotations,
context (encompassing juridical-administrative, provenancial, administrative,
procedural, documentary and technological) and medium (MacNeil, 2016).
InterPARES research found that many of the requirements diplomatically
established for creating reliable and preserving authentic electronic records:
could potentially be implemented through metadata and archival
description, particularly such aspects as identity, linkages, documentation
of documentary forms, juridical requirements, business rules and
technical procedures, access privileges, establishment of the authoritative
record when multiple copies exist and transfer of relevant documentation."
(Duranti Preston, 2008, p. 13)
Testing this assertion, InterPARES developed a metadata specification model for its
Chain of Preservation (i.e., the records life cycle) model. They defined 'metadata' as
a machine or human-readable assertion about a resource relating to records and their
resources, and descriptive metadata was defined as those categories of metadata
carried forward to be used as evidence for archival description. Speaking to the
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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