Compliance Brief

Scope the remediation before you pay for it.

Remediation firms quote per document. Metadata Minder maps accessibility, exposure, and retention risk in a single discovery pass — so your remediation vendor gets a ranked, targeted work order instead of an open-ended archive, and your invoice shrinks accordingly.

For informational purposes only. Not legal advice — consult counsel for jurisdiction-specific obligations.

Risk overview

Key compliance risks across public archives.

ADA · Title II

Digital accessibility deadlines for state & local government

The Department of Justice's Title II rule sets compressed timelines for state and local governments to make their web content and mobile apps accessible. Public PDFs and Office documents are explicitly in scope — and remediation effort scales with archive size.

FOIA & Public Records

Hidden metadata becomes a public-records problem

When a document is published or released, everything inside it travels with it — including author names, usernames, machine IDs, embedded objects, and edit trails. Once disclosed, it cannot be unpublished.

Records Retention

Defensible disposition starts with knowing what you have

Statutory retention windows only protect you if you can prove what was kept, what was disposed of, and when. Discovery is the prerequisite to any defensible retention program.

What we look for

Seven signals across every document.

A single discovery pass produces a structured findings report — ranked by likely remediation effort, exposure severity, and statutory urgency.

  • 01Author names embedded in document properties
  • 02Internal usernames and machine identifiers
  • 03Legacy metadata from older systems and digitization passes
  • 04Untagged headings and missing structural semantics
  • 05Image-only PDFs with no text layer or alt text
  • 06Inconsistent reading order in complex layouts
  • 07Documents whose stated dates contradict their content

Sample output

A findings report your records officer and general counsel can both read.

Findings Report · Excerpt

County Public Records Archive · Q3 Discovery Pass

REPORT-2026-0317

High severity

1,284

Documents with embedded author names

High severity

312

Image-only PDFs with no text layer

Med severity

89

Documents with temporal date contradictions

archive_size=48,217passes=3runtime=4h:12minfrastructure=on-prem