What is the role of administrative metadata?

The role of administrative metadata is to indicate the technical source of a digital asset. This type of metadata provides essential context regarding the origins, management processes, and maintenance of data or digital resources. Administrative metadata helps users understand where data comes from, the context in which it was created, and any logistical details that are important for data governance, access, and usage.

Having this information is crucial for data management practices, ensuring that users can trace back to the original source of the data if needed and understand any relevant administrative processes that have been applied to it. This also aids in compliance with data standards and regulations by maintaining transparency about the data's lifecycle.

While privacy information on data subjects is important, it falls under a different category of metadata known as descriptive or security metadata, which focuses more on legal and usage rights rather than administrative history. Describing relationships between tables is part of structural metadata, focused on the organization of data rather than its source. Organizing data into collections relates more to collection management metadata rather than administrative aspects.