Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies (RKMS) defines 20 elements (eight mandatory) and 65 sub-elements for the record keeping systems used by Commonwealth government agencies. It has similarities to the Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) metadata standard, but AGLS was designed to improve the accessibility of services by the general public, but the record keeping standard is for maintaining internal information to keep the government functioning.
Unfortunately RKMS is not a strict superset of AGLS. Some elements map directly from AGLS. Some elements have the same names as in AGLS, but with extended definitions. Some elements have the different names from AGLS, but simialr definitions.
The Public Record Office of Victoria has issued a more prescriptive standard for the management of electronic records than other Australian efforts with "Standard for the Management of Electronic Records in the Victorian Government" (VERS).
VERS uses a superset of the National Archives of Australia (NAA) Recordkeeping metadata. VERS allows multiple encoding of one document and fixes the record at the time of creation using digital signatures. This requires new metadata to be kept separate from the document, or wrapped around the original record to form a new compound record. It also assumes that a particular digital signature will be readable over a long time and that the digital signature standards used will be supported in the long term. VERS uses text, PDF and TIFF for its standard formats.
On their own EDM standards are of little use to an organisation; the standards need to be implemented. In this course hand coding of XML based standards has been used as an educations tool. However, most users of electronic documents are unlikely to be willing to manually enter the needed XML codes. Software which implements the standards is needed. EDM software is commonly provided to supplement common electronic office tools, such as word processors and email, to add metadata, convert document formats and to transfer documents to and from archives.
EDM software can be free open source, such as XENA and DPR NAA and the VERS Toolkit from the State of Victoria (all of which are written in Java). Software can be a commercial proprietary product, such as TRIM Context, which is commonly used in Australian Government agencies and the US Department of Defence.
NAA's XML Electronic Normalising of Archives software (XENA) will create a "Bitstream" or "Normalised" version of a source document. Both versions of the document have metadata enclosed with them ("wrapped). The bitstream version retains the original format of the document and so requires a copy of compatible software to read. The normalised version is converted to a standard format for long term preservation. XENA can bitstream any electronic format and normalise common office word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation formats, email and image files.
The Victorian Government's VERS Toolkit provides similar facilities to XENA.
In this example a Microsoft Word ".Doc" file has been converted to Open Document Format (ISO 26300, Version 1.0). The only metadata provided in the XML "wrapper" is the original file name.
NAA's Digital Preservation Recorder (DPR) automatically invokes XENA to convert and encapsulate files with metadata. Three copies of the DPR reside on the NAA three isolated systems for quarantine, preservation and digital archiving. The systems communicate only via the XML encoded data passed with the electronic documents, to ensure the security of the system.
Tower Software's TRIM product stared as standalone software for paper records management. However, it now interfaces with desktop software such as Microsoft Office, requiring the user to check documents in and out of the repository for modification. Documents can be exported to an archive, such as that of NAA, using XML metadata and record content.
Slides for these notes are also available.
Copyright © 2007 (version of 17 October 2007)Tom Worthington
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