Todd Carpenter [Managing Director, National Information Standards Organization]: "Last week, the Supreme Court of Arizona issued a ruling overturning a lower court on whether file metadata must be turned over in a public records request. The ruling [PDF file] essentially binds the inherent file metadata within the file itself. In its finding, the court ruled that the plaintiff's request for the administrative metadata records was indistinguishable from the request for the public records themselves.

Courts and governments generally have two interests in the preservation of metadata. The first relates to discovery and accessibility of information, the second is focused on provenance. The creation and management of metadata facilitates easy discovery of documents for retrieval and access. The second key value to the administrative metadata of a digital file is that it is one method for tracking the document's authenticity.

At issue in this case is the provenance of the records, not their actual content. In a print world, it can be relatively difficult to change a written date or otherwise forge a physical document. In the digital realm, changes are more easily made. However in many situations, information about creation, changes and authorship may be stored within the document. One could envision a future where, much like the wax stamps of the past, without the electronic seal of embedded administrative metadata a document may not be trusted at all.

The court did not comment on the types of data that might be required or the types of files to be used, only that the original file, with all of its associated metadata, be provided to the plaintiff. It would be a stretch by the court to know what types of files or even what types of metadata might be available in the future. The precedent that the metadata is an inherent part of the information of a document is an important one for the use of digital information in court.

As we move forward toward a world where documents are more often in a digital format than in print, we need to establish precedent for using the full range of digital information that can help to address the questions of provenance. As noted in the ruling [PDF file], "It would be illogical…to conclude that public entities can withhold information embedded in an electronic document, such as the date of creation, while they would be required to produce the same information if it were written manually on a paper public record." If we are to trust and rely on the digital information that is presented to us, particularly in a legal environment, the validity and provenance of that information needs to be grounded in as much valid information as we can gather. The court correctly understood the ramifications of withholding access to this information.

This is but one of many examples of how our understanding of records management needs to adjust to the rapidly evolving digital environment. Standards are slowly emerging in this area, as is case law. We can expect to see many more decisions like Lake v. Phoenix in the coming years."