How can I find/ change Metadata?

Question

I have two questions involving Bridge's Metadata. First of all, where is the original XMP Metadata saved after a batch process? Where can it be retrieved?
Secondly, is there anyway to make bridge automatically carry over information from one field into another? In other words, can I have 'file name' populate 'job identifier' with out going into some kind of reprogramming?

Answer 1

Picking up from Leah's query:
We are dealing with oodles (10,000+) of image files, some born digital and some scanned from film. The photographers and our partner organizations retain copies of the files and/or the original film and index/contact sheets, identified in various ways. We need to rename the files in a consistent manner for our long-term archiving, but we also need to retain somewhere the original filename and other legacy information (e.g., roll number, frame number, index sheet number, etc.) so that we can easily match up an image in our collection with its original. (For instance, to ask the organization holding the negative to rescan a given frame at a higher resolution.) So we need to store metadata such as the original file name, roll number, folder name, etc.--and when we rename files we need to retain the original file name. We would like to use the "Job Identifier" metadata field for all such information, potentially amending additional metadata several times. And we'd like to retain the original filename within this metadata field if possible. The "PreservedFileName" seems to store only the most recent previous name, so we'd like to read data from the "PreservedFileName" value and use that to populate (append, not replace) the "Job Identifier" field. Does this make our task clearer? Any suggestions will be appreciated.