Describing records in context in the continuum: The Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema

Archivaria

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 3-37

  McKemmish, Sue ^a   Acland, Glenda ^a   Ward, Nigel ^a   Reed, Barbara ^a,b  

^a MONASH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

^b Recordkeeping Systems Pty Ltd   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0002252914     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. US Department of Defense, DOD 5015.2-STD, Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications (November 1997). Available at: http://jitc-emh.army.mil/recmgt/dod50152.doc. The Standard includes specification of the descriptive metadata that records management software should capture.
2. International Council of Archives, ISAD(G): General International Standard Archival Description (Ottawa, 1994). Available at: http://data1.archives.ca/ica/cgi-bin/ica?04_e.
3. The term "recordkeeping community" is used in Australia to identify the community of records managers and archivists who consciously work under the "recordkeeping umbrella. " Their thinking and practice is informed by records continuum perspectives and they have worked together on major initiatives such as the Australian Records Management Standard, AS 4390, and the Australian Records and Archives Competency Standards.
4. The acronym SPIRT derives from the name of the Research Grant which funded the Project, Strategic Partnership with Industry-Research & Training (SPIRT) Support Grant, which provides for joint funding by the Australian Research Council and the Industry partners. The project was administered by Monash University on behalf of a collaborative Project team of researchers and industry partners, including the University of New South Wales, the National Archives of Australia, the New South Wales State Records Authority, the Queensland State Archives, the Australian Council of Archives, and the Records Management Association of Australia. The Project Chief Investigators were Sue McKemmish, Monash University, and Ann Pederson, University of New South Wales, with Industry Partner Chief Investigator Steve Stuckey of the National Archives of Australia. For background information on the project and its evolution, see Sue McKemmish, Adrian Cunningham, and Dagmar Parer, "Metadata Mania: Use of Metadata for Electronic Recordkeeping and Online Resource Discovery, " in Place, Interface and Cyberspace: Archives at the Edge, Proceedings of the 1998 Conference of the Australian Society of Archivists, Fremantle 6-8 August 1998 (Canberra, 1999), pp. 129-44.
5. For more information on this initiative, see the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Web Site: http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/and Stuart Weibel, "The State of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative April 1999, " D-Lib Magazine 5, no. 4 (April 1999). Available from: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/04weibel.html.
6. For a more detailed exploration of these issues, see Sue McKemmish, "Are Records Ever Actual?" in Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott, eds., The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years (Clayton, 1994), pp. 187-203, and Barbara Reed, "Metadata: Core Record or Core Business, " Archives and Manuscripts 25, no. 2 (November 1997), pp. 218-41.
7. Frank Upward, "Structuring the Records Continuum Part One: Post-custodial Principles and Properties, " Archives and Manuscripts 24, no. 2 (November 1996), pp. 268-85, and "Structuring the Records Continuum Part Two: Structuration Theory and Recordkeeping, " Archives and Manuscripts 25, no. 1 (May 1997), pp. 10-35.
8. See, for example, Chris Hurley, "The Making and Keeping of Records: (1) What Are Finding Aids For?" Archives and Manuscripts 26, no.1 (May 1998), pp. 57-77.
9. See in particular, David Bearman, "Record-Keeping Systems, " Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993), pp. 16-37.
10. Sue McKemmish, "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: A Continuum of Responsibility, " in Preserving Yesterday, Managing Today and Challenging Tomorrow: Proceedings 14th National Convention RMAA, 1997 (Perth, 1997), p. 19.
11. AS 4390.1-1996 Australian Standard: Records Management (Homebush, 1996).
12. AS 4390, Part 1: General, pp. 6-7.
13. Schema is used to mean the semantic and structural definition of the metadata used to describe recordkeeping entities. A schema describes the names of metadata elements, how they are structured, their meaning, etc. The metadata community also refers to a metadata schema as a metadata set or specification.
14. Within the Australian archival community the joint Australian Society of Archivists/Australian Council of Archives Committee on Descriptive Standards has endorsed the SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata Schema as a framework for the Committee's future work on the development of domain-specific recordkeeping metadata and archival descriptive standards. The Standards Australia Committee IT/21, responsible for AS4390 Australian Standard: Records Management, recently adopted a proposal by the Chair of this Committee to develop the SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata Schema into a framework Australian Standard for Recordkeeping Metadata.
15. Information accessibility initiatives in Australia, as elsewhere, are addressing challenges relating to dealing interoperably at whole-of-government and global levels in facilitating resource description and discovery, for example, the Australian Government Locator Service initiative (http://www.naa.gov.au/govserv/agls/), the whole-of-government directory GOLD-Government Online Directory (based on the X500 Directory Structure Standard)-and the web-based Functional Index of Federal Government (http://www.fedgov.au/). In response to the policy directions announced in late1997 as part of the Australian Government's Investing for Growth strategy (http://www.dist.gov.au/growth/html/infoage.html), a range of initiatives have also been taken to support and encourage individuals and organizations in transacting business electronically. They include initiatives relating to the establishment and accessibility of online government services and gateways to information about government services and service delivery points, e.g., the federal government's Government Online (http://www.ogo.gov.au/) and Business Entry Point (BEP) (http://www.business.gov.au/). The thrust of government online initiatives is towards fully enabled online transactions as a significant component of service delivery. The Electronic Transactions Bill 1999 (http://law.gov.au/ecommerce/interim3.html) is a model law which potentially provides the regulatory framework for the use of electronic communications in government transactions (defined broadly to encompass all of the activities of government agencies in their roles as service providers).
16. Terry Cook, "The Concept of the Archival Fonds: Theory, Description, and Provenance in the Post-custodial Era, " in Terry Eastwood, ed., The Archival Fonds: From Theory to Practice (Ottawa, 1992) p. 38.
17. See, for example, Margaret Hedstrom, "Building Record-Keeping Systems: Archivists Are Not Alone On The Wild Frontier, " Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997), pp. 44-71.
18. Wendy Duff, "Harnessing the Power of Warrant, " American Archivist 61 (Spring 1998), pp. 88-105.
19. University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences, "Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping, " available from: http://www.sis.pitt.edu/-nhprc/.
20. University of British Columbia, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, "Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records Project, " available from: http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/duranti/.
21. The concept of contextual metadata being "in the air" comes from Chris Hurley who has written extensively about issues relating to archival description, finding aids, and standards. See in particular: "The Making and Keeping of Records: (1) What Are Finding Aids For?" Archives and Manuscripts 26, no. 1 (May 1998), pp. 57-77.
22. For the use of the term metadata in a narrower sense and from a life cycle perspective, see in particular the writings of Heather MacNeil, for example, "Metadata Strategies and Archival Description: Comparing Apples to Oranges, " Archivaria 39 (Spring 1995), pp. 22-32.
23. AS4390 Australian Standard: Records Management.
24. Chris Hurley, "The Making and Keeping of Records, " p. 74.
25. For more information about the Australian Series System, see the following papers, published in McKemmish and Piggott, eds., The Records Continuum: Mark Wagland and Russell Kelly, "The Series System-A Revolution in Archival Control, " pp. 131-49.
26. Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift, "Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997), pp. 38-39. The quotation also references the following writings of Chris Hurley relating to the functional context of records: "What, If Anything, Is A Function?" Archives and Manuscripts 21, no. 2 (November 1993), pp. 208-20.
27. Chris Hurley, "The Australian (Series) System, " p. 169.
28. For further details of the Dublin Core (DC) initiative, see: http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/.
29. For more information on the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) initiative, see Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) Manual for Users, Version 1.1: 1999-06-09 (Canberra, 1999). Available at http://www.naa.gov.au/govserv/agls/.
30. Sue McKemmish, Glenda Acland, and Barbara Reed, "Towards a Framework for Standardising Recordkeeping Metadata: The Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema, " Records Management Journal 9, no. 3 (December 1999), pp. 177-202.
31. Information on the Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies can be found at: http://www.naa.gov.au/govserv/techpub/rkms/intro.htm.
32. The Committee has also proposed to Standards Australia that this codification be developed into an Australian National Standard within the framework provided by the RKMS.
33. Standards Australia, AS4390-1996, Australian Standard: Records Management. For details of availability see: http://www.standards.org.au/.
34. The Australian Society of Archivists commissioned Chris Hurley to collect and systematise information about how Australian archival institutions structure and use descriptive data. The outcome was the Australian Common Practices Manual. It is descriptive of Australian common practice within a conceptual framework which presents information about descriptive data in relation to four kinds of entities-ambience, provenance, records, and contents entities Ambient entities refer to organizations, families, and groupings of agencies by jurisdiction or competence.
35. The Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications can be accessed via http://jitc-emh.army.mil/recmgt/dod50152.doc.
36. The "Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping Project" reports can be found at: http://www.sis.pitt.edu/-nhprc/prog1.html.
37. The "Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records Project" and its outcomes are described at: http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/duranti/.
38. University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences, "Metadata Specifications Derived from the Functional Requirements: A Reference Model for Business Acceptable Communications, " available from: http://www.sis.pitt.edu/-nhprc/meta96.html. The BAC Model envisions records as dynamic, self-managing metadata-encapsulated objects. The metadata is specified in layers, namely the handle (or identification), structure, content, context, terms and conditions, and use layers. The context metadata is most relevant to the immediate transactional business context of the record, and does not provide for description of the broader contexts in which records are created and used.
39. ISAD (G) was designed to provide a standardised set of elements for describing records in archival custody (archives), its main objective being to facilitate access by researchers. It enables the description of archives at various levels of aggregation. Its companion standard, ISAAR (CPF), enables the descriptions of archives using ISAD(G) to be linked to standardised information about records creators. Information about both the General International Standard for Archival Description (Ottawa, 1994), and the International Standard Archival Authority Record For Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (Ottawa, 1996) is available via http://data1.archives.ca/ica/cgi-bin/ica?04_e.
40. EAD: Encoded Archival Description Application Guidelines Version 1.0, prepared by the Encoded Archival Description Working Group of the Society of American Archives (Chicago, 1999).
41. Public Record Office of Victoria, Victorian Electronic Records Strategy Final Report, 1998, available at: http://home.vicnet.net.au/-provic/vers/final.htm. The VERS project developed functional specifications for an electronic archival system that captures records and their descriptive metadata as PDF files. The descriptive metadata is also captured in an XML database for management and resource discovery purposes. The metadata set specified as part of the VERS project is essentially a scaled-down version of the Business Acceptable Communications Model metadata. For more information about the VERS project, see also: Justine Heazlewood et al., "Electronic Records: Problem Solved?" Archives and Manuscripts 27, no. 1 (May 1999), pp. 96-113.
42. Project Team member Kate Cumming is developing a series of crosswalks as part of her Masters thesis research work.
43. The Project Team, in developing a simple but high level framework model for recordkeeping metadata given as Figure 1, used as an example of effective visual representation the INDECS Community's "Model for Commerce" in David Bearman, Eric Miller, Godfrey Rust, Jennifer Trant, and Stuart Weibel, "A Common Model to Support Interoperable Metadata: Progress Report on Reconciling Metadata Requirements from the Dublin Core and INDECS/DOI Communities, " D-Lib, 5, no. 1 (January 1999). Available at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/bearman/01bearman.html.
44. The concept of mandate used in the Project has drawn on the work of the University of Pittsburgh "Functional Requirements for Evidence in Recordkeeping Project" on warrants for recordkeeping in organizational contexts, in particular the work of Wendy Duff (see "Harnessing the Power of Warrant"), and on the writing of Sue McKemmish on the broad social mandates found in sociology, creative writing, and reflective narratives for the role of personal recordkeeping in witnessing to individual lives and constituting part of society's collective memory and cultural identity ("Evidence of Me, " Archives and Manuscripts 24, no. 1 [May 1996], pp. 28-45).
45. The Business entity class comprises entities represented on the Transactional Axis of the Model, the Agent entity class those on the Identity Axis, and the Records entity class those on the Recordkeeping Axis. For more information, see Frank Upward, "Structuring the Records Continuum Part One: Post-custodial Principles and Properties. "
46. World Wide Web Consortium Homepage: http://www.w3.org/.
47. W3C RDF Homepage: http://www.w3.org/RDF.
48. Simon Cox has written an excellent discussion paper for the DC community on issues relating to structure, authority, and qualification in DC: http://www.agcrc.csiro.au/projects/3018CO/metadata/dc-guide.
49. ISO 8601: 1988 (E), "Data elements and interchange formats-Information interchange-Representation of dates and times. "
50. Terry Cook, "The Concept of the Archival Fonds, " p. 38.
51. Sue McKemmish, "Are Records Ever Actual?" p. 189.
52. See endnote 38 for a brief outline of the purposes of ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF).
53. See: http://www.naa.gov.au/govserv/techpub/rkms/intro.htm.
54. CycL: The CYC Representation Language.
55. KIF: Knowledge Interchange Format.
56. T. Halpin, Conceptual Schema & Relational Database Design, Second Edition (Australia, 1995).
57. Entity Relationship (ER) Modelling is a popular modelling technique which represents the high-level concepts in the users' world, in terms of entities and the relationships between these entities. Each entity has one or more "attributes" associated it with it, which represent the properties of that entity. ER modelling is primarily used today as part of the process of database design.
58. T. Halpin, Conceptual Schema & Relational Database Design.
59. A comparison of ER modelling and ORM can be found in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Conceptual Modeling. See: http://www.inconcept.com/JCM/index.html.
60. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0.
61. This is the approach taken by the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) project, amongst others. VERS defines metadata for specific levels of records aggregation, as well as specifying agent and business metadata to be associated with the record itself. For more information on the VERS project: http://home.vicnet.net.au/-provic/vers/final.htm.