Metadata in Practice: Lessons from the St. Louis Zoo
Metadata allows organizations to move from buried folder details to automated indexing, from one-person gatekeeping to role-based access, and from reactive cleanup to more defensible control.
However, metadata can seem technical and complex, so taking it from where you are now to where you want to be can feel like putting together a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle of zebras where every piece looks almost the same.
That’s what made the webinar Metadata in Practice: Making Records Easier to Find, Use, and Control so useful: Randy Sanders of Access and Rae Lynn Haliday of the St. Louis Zoo brought metadata out of the abstract and into the day-to-day reality of records management.
Often referred to as “data about the data,” metadata is a standardized, structured way of describing information. It provides critical context about a record, enabling people to find what they need, collaborate more easily, and dramatically improve workplace efficiency.
Examples of metadata include a document’s format, the date it was created, authorship, editing timestamps, version history, copyright information, the access and compliance rules governing it, and its retention code.
During the webinar, Rae Lynn described metadata as the enabler of the creation, management, and use of records through time and across systems.
While metadata’s most obvious benefit is making information easier to search for and find, teams often underestimate how foundational it is to everything downstream, such as governance, security, control, and defensible disposition.
Access’ Randy Sanders emphasized that metadata application should be done as close to record creation as possible because trying to clean it up later is dramatically more expensive in time, money, and effort. Why allow it to become cleanup work when it can be built into the process at the start?
The value metadata provides can’t be understated. “It’s worth every second of time, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, that you’re gonna put into the creation and management of metadata. It’s worth every bit of that effort.” Rae Lynn said after recounting her records management journey at the St. Louis Zoo.
When Rae Lynn described the early state of records management at the St. Louis Zoo in the 90’s, it sounded familiar in all the uncomfortable ways. The environment was “a hundred percent paper based.” There were ledger books, historical cards, rows of file cabinets, and handwritten folders. Metadata already existed, but it was buried inside documents, spread across different files, and hard to use in any systematic way. The result was a process that was slow, difficult to scale, and too dependent on one person to locate or interpret the record.
Over time, the zoo moved from paper files to a more structured approach inside an electronic document management system (EDMS). They built naming conventions, created an index, automated metadata extraction from a core form, and tied that work back to the retention schedule.
The process matured over a 35-year time span, and the improvement was substantial: “There’s just no comparison. When we look back at how metadata was captured and buried in paper files, it was there, it wasn’t organized in a systematic way, there was really no security. But now it’s role-based cloud hosted with standardized record series assigned and documented on the zoo specific retention schedule.”
This example proves that many organizations are not starting from scratch. They already have valuable information, but it often lives in inconsistent formats that are hard to access and even harder to govern. Rather than creating metadata from the ground up, the real opportunity is to extract existing metadata, standardize it, and automate it.
The key is just getting started.
Randy followed that example with the most actionable guidance in the conversation: “Start small,” “start really small,” “get a few of those successes where you can build that credibility,” and “get a couple of those quick wins in, normalize it, and you’ll see it snowball after that.”
Here’s the step-by-step version of that advice, translated into a practical playbook for records managers:
Randy reduced metadata to three essentials: “What is it? Who owns it? And then how do we manage it?” Asking these questions will reveal how metadata is currently used in your organization and reveal opportunities for improvement.
Do not try to standardize everything at once. Pick one records process where better metadata would clearly improve retrieval, control, or turnaround time. The zoo example started with a specific transaction file workflow and built from there.
In many organizations, the metadata already exists, but it’s trapped in folders, forms, spreadsheets, or legacy file structures. Rae Lynn’s example is instructive here: the answer was not to invent everything from scratch, but to extract, organize, and automate what was already there.
Choose a small set of fields that drive retrieval and control. In the zoo example, those included the class of animal, whether it came in or went out, the organization involved, the shipment date, and a unique identifier. The lesson is that standardized, meaningful fields make the system usable.
Randy emphasized that capturing metadata “as early as possible in the process,” is important because “if you don’t do it towards the beginning or creation, it’s 10x the cost of time, resources, and money to do it later.” In practice, that means designing metadata capture into intake, creation, or approval workflows—not leaving it as a cleanup exercise.
Manual entry still has a place, but the more organizations can automate capture through templates, predefined fields, OCR, or intelligent indexing, the more consistency they can create. Randy warned that even small variations in naming, ownership, or field structure create downstream problems for control, retrieval, and governance. Start by automating repetitive data capture, indexing, reminders, or workflow notifications where possible.
Quick wins create trust. Randy’s language here is especially useful: “Get a few of those successes where you can build that credibility.” That is how you get from one good process to broader adoption.
Teams often hesitate because they assume metadata work will not be seen as a priority or that resources will be hard to secure. Rae Lynn’s advice was straightforward: “you’re not gonna get something unless you ask for it.” She also urged practitioners to strengthen their own skills so they can write “a convincing justification and a case study” and demonstrate why the work deserves support.
Internal sponsors, purchasing, IT, vendors, and peers all matter. Rae Lynn described how serving on the St. Louis chapter of ARMA allowed her to build relationships with industry peers and external vendors. Coupled with internal departmental relationships, they all helped her move complex projects forward.
Metadata maturity grows in stages, not through a one-time “transformation” project. The zoo’s path ran from paper to color coding, to automated forms, to an EDMS, to cloud hosting and integrations.
The conversation ended where many records conversations are heading now: AI. Both speakers were careful not to overstate what AI can do today, but they made an important point that records managers should pay attention to: If AI is part of the future, metadata is part of the foundation. Randy said, “If you frame everything we’ve talked about as the basis for implementing AI, to get the most out of that in the future, it all starts with metadata.”
For additional insights from Rae Lynn and Randy, watch the full recording of Metadata in Practice: Making Records Easier to Find, Use, and Control.
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