When it comes to declaring electronic records, information governance professionals have been struggling for some time with the issue of what metadata to preserve.
This may not be as much of an issue with native files, so long as they are preserved intact upon creation, or when it comes to data stored in various and sometimes sophisticated platforms such as back-up or archival systems, and other enterprise systems that may automatically store all metadata in native format.
This is, in fact, the preferred mode of production currently advocated by some counsel and courts. Unfortunately, when it comes to preservation of documents generated by common business applications (often unstructured data found in both large and small organizations) for records management purposes, the question becomes more difficult. What metadata fields are considered usable or relevant in determining what to capture at the end of the day if a record is or has been migrated to another format?
