Interoperable data: Sustainable frameworks for creating and managing recordkeeping metadata

Purpose – The ability to establish sustainable frameworks for creating and managing recordkeeping metadata is one of the key challenges for recordkeeping in digital and networked environments. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of the Clever Recordkeeping Metadata Project, an Australian research project which sought to investigate how the movement of recordkeeping metadata between systems could be automated. Design/methodology/approach – The project adopted an action research approach to the research, utilising a systems development method within this framework to iteratively build a prototype demonstrating how recordkeeping metadata could be created once in particular application environments, then used many times to meet a range of business and recordkeeping purposes. Findings – Recordkeeping metadata interoperability, like recordkeeping metadata itself, is complex and dynamic. The research identifies the need for standards and tools to reflect and have the capacity to handle this complexity. Originality/value – This paper provides insights into the complex nature of recordkeeping metadata and the kind of infrastructure that needs to be developed to support its automated capture and re‐use in integrated systems environments.