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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight the widespread crisis facing the archives and records management professions, and to propose recordkeeping informatics, a single minded disciplinary approach, as a way forward.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reflects an Australasian perspective on the nature of the crisis besetting archives and records management professions as people struggle to adjust to digitally converged information ecologies. It suggests recordkeeping informatics as an approach for refiguring thinking, systems, processes and practices as people confront ever increasing information convergence, chaos and complexity. It discusses continuum thinking and recordkeeping metadata as two key building blocks of the approach, along with three facets of recordkeeping analysis involving the understanding of organisational culture, business process analysis and archival access.FindingsDiscussion of information and communication technologies as a “wild frontier” highlights the breaking down of recordkeeping processes within them. The causes for this chaos are complex and there is an urgent need to develop more coherent frameworks to identify and address the issues. Such frameworks need to grow from, and be conversant with, strong symbiotic relationships between social formations, recordkeeping processes, and archives, so that they may be applicable in an increasingly diverse range of organisational and community contexts. Embracing complexity is a must if the wild frontier is not to grow wilder.Originality/valueThe paper outlines a new disciplinary base from which new and old recordkeeping methods can be launched that are appropriate for this era.

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 rethought through the conceptual and analytical approach that is embedded in the metadata schema registry.

Established as a British Colony in 1835, Victoria was considered the leader in Australian indigenous administration—the first colony to legislate for the “protection” and legal victualing of Aborigines, and the first to collect statistical data on their decline and anticipated disappearance. The official record, however, excludes the data that can explain the Aborigines' stunning recovery. A painstaking investigation combining family histories; Victoria's birth, death, and marriage registrations; and census and archival records provides this information. One startling finding is that the surviving Aboriginal population is descended almost entirely from those who were under the protection of the colonial state.

is a key component in the creation, management and preservation of electronic records, as well as their innovative use as archives, memory and knowledge. However metadata generation and deployment are currently resource intensive and application specific. Metadata creation is not usually fully automated. Metadata created in one application of potential relevance to other applications is not shared between applications. Although data modeling, mark up language and syntax initiatives are addressing the data representation requirements for metadata translation and exchange, this functionality has not as yet been utilized in the systems that support eGovernment and eBusiness processes, electronic recordkeeping and archival description. Moreover there has been little progress in relation to developing strategies and meta-tools for the translation of metadata attributes and values between schemas in these environments. The Monash Clever Recordkeeping Metadata (CRKM) project addresses the challenge of automating metadata creation and sharing metadata between business systems, current recordkeeping systems and archival systems. This paper explores the relevance of the CRKM project to future archival systems and the deployment of metadata for multiple archival purposes. It is presented as part of the Smart Metadata and the Archives of the Future session that aims to communicate the progress and findings of several inter-related collaborative research projects and standards initiatives. Other papers in the session report on the related work of the InterPARES 2 Description Research Team