Annuario 2020 – Documentare con i metadati il documento digitale – Alessandro Alfier

The essay analyzes the role of metadata in the life cycle of electronic records through the study of what differentiates them from traditional analog records. It starts by affirming the inapplicability to electronic records of traditional concepts linked to the materiality of the record and proceeds to show the impact of this on the traditional documentary practice of annotations, which, in the digital environment, occurs through the use of metadata. The analysis is followed by an in-depth study
of the reasons why electronic records must be linked to progressively increasing layers of metadata, reasons that are also examined in light of the ISO 23081-1:2017 standard. The essay ends with the observation that precisely these reasons cause electronic records to manifest themselves as information packages.