ISO 23081 (Records Management Processes — Metadata for Records)

ISO 23081 is the international standard covering metadata for records management. Where ISO 15489 sets out what records management is supposed to achieve — the creation, capture, and management of authoritative, reliable evidence of business activity — ISO 23081 specifies the metadata a records system needs in order to actually deliver that: metadata that lets a record be found, understood, trusted, and managed correctly for as long as it needs to be kept, including through migrations between systems.

The three parts

• ISO 23081-1 (Principles) sets out the principles and rationale that underpin records metadata. It deliberately does not prescribe a fixed set of metadata elements every organisation must implement, since the right elements vary by jurisdiction, sector, and system.
• ISO 23081-2 (Conceptual and implementation issues) builds on Part 1 with a metadata model and practical guidance for defining metadata elements — covering entities such as the record itself, its business context, and the agents and mandates involved — so organisations can design a schema consistent with Part 1’s principles.
• ISO/TR 23081-3, published as a Technical Report, provides a self-assessment method for checking an existing or proposed metadata schema against the standard.

Why it goes beyond descriptive metadata

Ordinary descriptive metadata (title, author, subject, date) is enough to help someone find an item. It is not enough to manage that item as an accountable record. ISO 23081’s recordkeeping metadata model adds the layers a records or archives function actually needs: which business process or mandate created the record, who is responsible for it, what it is related to, what retention period and disposition authority applies to it, and how its authenticity can be demonstrated if it is ever relied on as evidence. This is the metadata that lets an institution show a record has not been altered, know when it is due for review or destruction, and keep it usable and interpretable as it moves between systems over years or decades.

Relevance to research-records governance

For universities, funders, and research institutions, ISO 23081 is directly relevant wherever research outputs are also formal records subject to retention and governance obligations — grant files, ethics approvals, clinical trial master files, human-subjects consent documentation, and institutional data management plans. A research-records or institutional-archives function applying ISO 23081-aligned metadata is not just describing these items for discovery; it is capturing the business context, custody, and disposition information a retention schedule and an audit or compliance review depend on. This sits alongside, and complements, discipline-specific research-data metadata standards: a data management plan or a repository’s descriptive metadata schema tells you what a dataset or record is, while ISO 23081-style recordkeeping metadata tells you how it is governed as an accountable record over its lifecycle.

How it relates to other metadata standards

ISO 23081 sits in a broader ecosystem of metadata standards that CASRAI’s dictionary also covers. It is a companion to ISO 15489 (the core records management standard) rather than a competitor to domain-specific schemas: an institution might use ISO 23081 principles to design its recordkeeping metadata layer while still using METS to package digital objects, aligning preservation-event metadata the way PREMIS does for digital preservation, or using a survey/data-specific scheme like the DDI Codebook for research data documentation. The common thread across all of them, including a general-purpose metadata schema, is making a resource’s context and management history explicit and machine-readable rather than implicit.