1.1 Name and Identify - RIM Manual

Authority

The Managing Government Information Policy (MGIP) requires that ministries: 

• ensure information is identifiable to be managed throughout its lifecycle via consistent measures that include naming conventions, appropriate metadata, and information schedules (1.3); 
• clearly identify office of primary responsibility (OPR) (1.4); and
• identify critical information in their custody or control (1.7).

About Name and Identify

Recorded information must be adequately identified to support its management throughout its lifecycle. Do this by providing records and data with strong names and/or codes and filing or saving them in the right place. Keeping related information together in a file with a unique identifier ensures that contextual information is retained (as when all the information about one project or case is filed together).

Names and titles should be meaningful, searchable, and consistently used within an organization to support daily operational work as well as efficient and effective responses to access to information and legal discovery requests. Standardized metadata elements, often automatically generated by software tools and records storage systems, provide additional means of identifying and retrieving information.

Good naming practices help to preserve the integrity and value of government information by keeping the structure, context, and content intact to facilitate future searching and use.

Best Practices

1. Provide consistent names

Follow your business area’s naming conventions when adding titles to folders, files, and data sets where government information is stored.

2. Routinely apply metadata

Capture the context of information at the point of creation or receipt so that it is clear who the creator and recipient(s) are, the time of creation or receipt, and the purpose or associated transaction. Where possible, automate the creation of contextual metadata to increase consistency and reduce effort. 

3. Identify the responsible office

Where information is created collaboratively or shared across multiple offices, clearly identify your ministry’s office of primary responsibility (OPR) for retention of the information. In many cases, this will relate to the executive authority governing a matter or decision, while in other cases an OPR may be specifically identified within an ORCS or other information schedule. All other offices within the ministry should follow non-OPR schedules. 

4. Identify critical information

Critical information is among government’s most valuable assets. Identify and store critical information in an appropriate recordkeeping system to support accurate and efficient information searches, protect privacy and confidentiality, preserve long-term reliability of the information, and manage appropriate access.

5. Support information security and privacy

Identify applicable requirements and ensure names and other metadata comply with them. For more information see the Information Security Policy and Guidelines and the Privacy Management and Accountability Policy.