Reflections on the Value of Metadata Archaeology for Recordkeeping in a Global, Digital World

Reflections on the Value of Metadata Archaeology for Recordkeeping in a Global, Digital World

Archives

Recordkeeping metadata have been instrumental in constructing and promulgating, as well as reflecting, narratives for their era from antiquity into the digital age across cultures and belief systems. They thus can serve as a critical apparatus for articulating, delimiting and contextualizing the record and the archive on an infinite number of temporal dimensions. The implementations and worldviews of metadata, however, historically are often discontinuous or vary in different periods and settings, making it harder to discern their manifestations and influence. Metadata, and discourse formation around metadata, therefore, deserve and require careful excavation, contextualization, and analysis. The paper proposes using a Foucauldian ‘archaeological’ approach to gain a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of the diversity of metadata and metadata discourses. It illustrates this approach with perhaps one of the earliest of historical cases—that of the Royal Archive at Ebla.

Gililand, Anne J.

Journal of the Society of Archivists

2011

Polk, Victoria

2011 Archives and Records Association

Journal Article

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00379816.2011.563934#.VTYsX84bAmI

Gilliland, Anne J. “Reflections on the Value of Metadata Archaeology for Recordkeeping in a Global, Digital World.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 32,1 (April 2011):103-118.