Manual for the Design and Implementation of Recordkeeping Systems (dirks)
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| Example: Have you identified a requirement to keep business records for long periods of time? If your records are in electronic form, maintaining these records for the ten, twenty or fifty years that may be required by legislation or to meet business needs, can be a difficult process. In this situation, you could look at utilising metadata as a means of helping you to meet this requirement. You could use metadata to flag those records requiring ongoing migration or to initiate the types of preservation acts they require. Metadata could also be used to document any preservation activities performed upon the records as part of your ongoing accessibility strategy. |
Improving metadata creation and management
Doing Steps A-C and knowing the types of requirements relating to metadata, or those that can be satisfied by using metadata, is important.
Steps D-G of the DIRKS methodology can help you to apply this knowledge. These steps of the methodology can help you to:
- determine whether your existing systems enable your metadata requirements to be met
- employ a range of strategies to ensure adequate metadata is made and managed to support your recordkeeping operations
- undertake system design work where necessary, to help you meet your metadata requirements, and
- implement metadata effectively across your office.
Step D: Assessment of existing systems
In Step D you assess the capacities of your existing systems to meet your recordkeeping requirements. Including metadata analysis in your Step D assessments is important to determine the efficacy of your current metadata capture and management and to establish whether this can be improved.
To assess the metadata in your business systems, you need to have a good understanding of how business is currently transacted in your office. What technology is used, how is it used? What are the rules and procedures that people are following? Have problems in interpreting or using records been identified that you can use metadata to rectify?
Within your business systems, it is important to know the metadata they contain and how this metadata is being managed.
| ^ Tip: How to identify metadata You can identify the metadata captured within a system by examining the system itself, by reading system documentation, data dictionaries and data models. Staff using the system will also be able to provide you with an understanding of the types of data they create and manage about records in their daily business operations. |
| Example: Some questions you may want to ask during your system assessment to determine whether your system's metadata creation and management is appropriate include:
|
| Tip: Metadata can be stored at different levels Depending on the type of system you are assessing, metadata may be captured to describe:
Each of these options can be appropriate, but you need to determine the levels and types of metadata that will work best to meet your recordkeeping requirements. |
If, at the end of your Step D assessment, you determine that your existing practices, systems and structures are currently not enabling you to create and manage the metadata you require, Steps E - G can help you to design or redesign systems and practices that enable you to generate and maintain the metadata you require to meet your business requirements.
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Step E: Identification of strategies for recordkeeping
Once you have determined what metadata you should be capturing and examined the capacities of your current systems, in Step E you can examine the policy, design, standards and implementation tactics to determine the combination of these strategies that will best enable you to implement your metadata strategy across your office.
Based on your assessments in Step C: Identification of recordkeeping requirements and Step D: Assessment of existing systems you may have determined that different systems in your department/office require different metadata solutions. You may therefore develop quite a mixed approach in Step E, utilising policy and design based approaches, to ensure all the gaps you identified in Step D are able to be rectified.
| Example: In one business area that operates in a high risk environment you may decide that a system needs to be redesigned to enable more metadata capture and to potentially automate much of this capture. In another business area where the technical infrastructure is adequate but metadata capture is poor, you may decide to implement the policy tactic and establish rules that specify exactly what metadata people need to capture about each of the business transactions they document. |
Step F: Design of a recordkeeping system
If, in Step F, you decide to design technical components of your systems, metadata will be a key component of your system design work. If you are working with IT or systems staff to develop your technical components, you will find that they generally have a good understanding of metadata and will provide you with some good ideas about how it can be used to best affect within your systems.
Part of effective system design is determining how the metadata you will require is to be generated. There are numerous options open to you. Metadata can be:
- input by staff
- automatically captured by system as a part of business transactions
- automatically created by system according to rules established within it (such as sequential file numbering, automatic capture of audit log details, automatic attribution of disposal class according to classified title applied to file)
- drawn from recordkeeping tools such as retention and disposal schedules, thesauri – it is very important to have such tools to help populate your metadata fields and automate records management activities
- derived from security classification scheme employed within your office
- obtained from IT system controls, inherited from logins etc
- taken from dates and times inherited from system clocks
Metadata can be stored in documents, databases, distributed systems, paper form – a range of different options – so consider that which is best for your needs and what works best with your existing technologies.
A range of other guidance about incorporating recordkeeping metadata in your recordkeeping system design is included in Step F: Design of a recordkeeping system.
| ^ Tip: Try to automate metadata capture If you are designing your system to capture better metadata, try to automate your metadata capture as much as possible. Look at the business environment surrounding your system, the recordkeeping tools you have developed and data that is maintained in other systems. Try to see where you can automatically extract or derive data from, to save users from having to enter significant amounts of information. |
If, in Step E: Identification of strategies for recordkeeping you decided not to develop technical components of systems (i.e. decided not to adopt the design tactic), in Step F you can design approaches using the policy and implementation tactics to help ensure that metadata is better made and managed in your department/section. For example you can develop:
- policy or procedural documentation that require staff capture adequate metadata and explain specifically how they achieve this, or
- training programs to show staff how to use existing technical applications and recordkeeping tools, such as retention and disposal schedules or thesauri, to create adequate metadata within systems.
| ^ Tip: Remember that metadata can be used to drive functionality in your recordkeeping system Understanding metadata as an active entity will help you to implement the dynamic functionality it can enable in your business and records management operations. Will the metadata you are implementing enable you to trigger record disposal operations? How can your metadata and system be configured to enable records to be automatically dispatched along a workflow? Remember that implementing recordkeeping metadata should not be about creating data profiles, but about facilitating process. |
| ^ Tip: Be aware in your system design work that your organization's metadata may need to evolve through time The metadata your organization creates should evolve and be added to through time. Be aware of this when designing metadata systems, or liaising with software vendors over system design. A static, fixed metadata description will only serve a limited number of business needs. If your organization has strong accountability requirements, can an audit trail of record use be compiled and maintained about high risk records? If your systems automatically trigger record migration operations, can documentation of these operations be captured within the system? |
Step G: Implementation of a recordkeeping system
In Step G, you implement your metadata strategies in your organization. Depending on the nature of your metadata project, only a small amount of implementation work may be required. If you have designed your system so that your metadata capture is significantly automated, you will need to apply the new system, and inform staff of its new capacities.
If you are relying on staff to provide much of the metadata for you, you will need to implement a training program and/or the policies and guidelines you have developed to clearly inform staff about the metadata they will be required to capture and the ways in which they can do this.
| ^ Tip: Be aware of the training that may be required to support metadata implementation Certain forms of metadata creation can be complex, so ensure your staff have the knowledge they need to accomplish this. For example, if staff are expected to use recordkeeping tools, such as retention and disposal schedules or thesauri, to create adequate metadata within systems, they may require specialised training. If accuracy is crucial to your work, special emphasis on the importance of clear, consistent metadata creation may also need to be made. |