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The traditional archival accessioning of records when they are no longer required by their originators has led to problems, especially in the case of electronic records. This has created not only huge backlogs but also either the non‐receipt of electronic records or their receipt with vital contextual or structural metadata missing. The solution put forward by Bearman, Hedstrom, Dollar and Kandur is the metadata systems approach. This approach involves archivists in managing the context and structure of electronic records rather than their content. This is achieved not only through using electronic records’ existing metadata, but also through archivists influencing the design of electronic records systems to provide them with the metadata they need. MacNeil, however, has reservations about the metadata systems approach, and feels that archivists’ influence on metadata for potential secondary use contravenes the archivist’s primary duty to protect and preserve. This article posits that the positive effects of archivists’ influence on metadata far outweigh the negative.

This article is a shortened version of a Master’s dissertation for the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies. It deals with issues of appraisal. Such issues involve fundamental concepts on what records are, why they are kept, and their life cycle. The answers to these questions were sought and found in the history of archives, and in the specialist literature. The theory and the methodology adopted were then applied to a case study of a recently established organisation in Lisbon, which has, at the core of its business, information in electronic format.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the relationship between and among genres, discourse communities, and their associated ideologies by means of a historical case study of the rise and decline of a particular archival finding aid genre, i.e., the calendar, within the Public Records Office of Great Britain (PRO) between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

The study demonstrates the ways in which the calendar genre, as it evolved in the PRO, reproduced, framed, and perpetuated a progressive, consensual understanding of the history of the British nation, and worked to construct a community of historical workers comprising select members of the PRO’s professional staff and select users.

The study deepens and extends understanding of discourse communities and the ideologies they promote and suppress and contributes to the emergent understanding of archival finding aids as socio-cultural texts by exposing the ways in which they participate in the formation and shaping of knowledge.

The greatest challenges with which digital systems present us are the creation and maintenance of reliable records and the preservation of their authenticity over time. It is vital for every organisation that its records be able to stand for the facts they are about i.e. that their content is trustworthy. To meet these challenges the international community of records professionals must develop appropriate strategies, procedures and standards. In this article the author explores the concepts and principles derived from archival diplomatics that should guide the management of electronic records and therefore these developments, as well as drawing conclusions about the nature of the research work required

In the 1990s, North American archivists and records managers shifted some of their concern with electronic records and record keeping systems to conducting research about the nature of these records and systems. This essay describes one of the major research projects at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, supported with funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Specifically, the essay focuses on the project's four main products: recordkeeping functional requirements, production rules to support the requirements, metadata specifications for record keeping, and the warrant reflecting the professional and societal endorsement of the concept of the recordkeeping functional requirements.

This article examines the various definitions accorded to the two key terms in records management ‐ the records and records management. Variations in their definition have lead to confusion which affects the formulation of theory to underpin the discipline. This problem is to be discussed in two separate parts. Part 1 discusses the changing definition of the ‘record’ as it evolves from an archives perspective, through a management perspective to an information technology perspective. These changes have lead to changes in the status of records. This is discussed as records as objects vs records as electronic objects. However, this is not a new issue. It was recognised by Jenkinson as early as 1922. The debate on the definition of records concludes that any new definition needs to take account of the component parts of a record: the information, the medium and the function. Part 2 will discuss the various definitions of records management.

Contemporary practices of information management tend to approach information as discrete and decontextualised units. The creation and capture of electronically generated metadata, specific to individual transactions, have become a primary concern of the archival and records management literature. The prevalent model of discrete metadata capture lends itself easily to automation, but it cannot emulate the intellectual control offered by traditional classification structures such as file plans. The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of the literature.

The paper provides a critical review of literature.

Recognition of contextual structures and relationships cannot at present be automated, natural language processing capabilities are poor, and metadata can easily become decoupled from “disembodied” discrete units of information. Discrete metadata capture has been developed in the context of commercial transactions rather than information management.

File plans as explicit organisations of knowledge can be used to generate contextually significant metadata for records. Such metadata may then be of considerable value to digital curation processes.

This critique will be useful in considering practical approaches to metadata capture.