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Contemporary practices of information management tend to approach information as discrete and decontextualised units. The creation and capture of electronically generated metadata, specific to individual transactions, have become a primary concern of the archival and records management literature. The prevalent model of discrete metadata capture lends itself easily to automation, but it cannot emulate the intellectual control offered by traditional classification structures such as file plans. The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of the literature.

The paper provides a critical review of literature.

Recognition of contextual structures and relationships cannot at present be automated, natural language processing capabilities are poor, and metadata can easily become decoupled from “disembodied” discrete units of information. Discrete metadata capture has been developed in the context of commercial transactions rather than information management.

File plans as explicit organisations of knowledge can be used to generate contextually significant metadata for records. Such metadata may then be of considerable value to digital curation processes.

This critique will be useful in considering practical approaches to metadata capture.