Towards a 21st Century Metadata Infrastructure Supporting the Creation, Preservation and Use of Trustworthy Records: Developing the InterPARES 2 Metadata Schema Registry

This paper argues that an essential component of electronic recordkeeping needs to be an infrastructure to support the creation, preservation and accessibility over time of trustworthy, understandable metadata. This infrastructure can then also be used to provide specifications and an implementation environment for automated tools to assist archivists in the ongoing management of trustworthy records and metadata, and users in the identification, retrieval, and manipulation of those records and metadata. The paper discusses this need in the context of the development by the International research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES 2) Description Cross-Domain Group of a metadata schema registry. This registry is a prototype resource designed to assist archivists and records creators in multiple domains in developing and assessing their own and other communities’ metadata infrastructures. The paper concludes by identifying two contested issues that are surfaced and how they are being confronted by this work: one of these is a definitional issue that relates to how to delineate the concept of archival description in the face of competing notions of “metadata.” The other is the extent to which both the life cycle and continuum worldviews and associated activities can or should be supported, reconciled or even re-thought through the conceptual and analytical approach that is embedded in the metadata schema registry.