Electronic Records

Electronic records are the evidence, in digital form, of transactions undertaken by individuals or by organizations. At first glance, they may seem to differ only in their physical medium from paper records. But the creation of records in electronic form has created practical, legal, and technological obstacles to public accountability that have yet to be fully overcome.

The challenges are simple to illustrate. The creation since the 1960s of ever-larger databases and, subsequently, of unstructured office systems has been driven by business need—whether in government or in the private sector. But when the systems used to store the data have become obsolete, those responsible for the data have been faced with formidable challenges if they are to continue to retrieve the data and to make them available. The originating software may no longer be supported by software suppliers, or it may be necessary to migrate data onto new software platforms. Each migration of data customarily involves some loss in data quality. Either way, organizations struggle to maintain accountability over time—whether they are pharmaceutical companies demonstrating the lineage of their products or governments responding to freedom of information requests.

Attempts to resolve these problems by saving records in paper form have been found to be unsatisfactory. Paper records do not have the same functionality as their electronic counterparts. In the United States, for example, the courts have held that e-mail records of the U.S. President Ronald Reagan White House should not be destroyed because paper printouts are not acceptable substitutes for the electronic records. In 1993, the trial judge in Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President commented that the two versions were not interchangeable.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, government and private agencies came to recognize that electronic records represented a significant challenge to business effectiveness and to accountability. By the turn of the century, most organizational responses to the challenge proceeded from a delineation of the essential characteristics of electronic records—a characterization that emphasizes the record's authenticity (it is what it says it is), its reliability (it is authoritative and trustworthy), its integrity (whether it is complete and unaltered), and its usability (the ability to locate, retrieve, and present the record). This focus on “recordness” is now finding its way into statutory definitions of records and into national and international standards.

Software houses have responded to the challenge by developing specialized electronic records management (ERM) tools that sit alongside office systems—and other primary software—and capture not just evidence of business transactions, but the associated metadata needed to interpret those transactions (e.g., evidence of who sent what to whom, when). The prize in this branch of systems development is to achieve a better integration of ERM tools with desktop software and to reduce dependence on the user—whose focus will rarely be on the archiving of the data he or she has just processed.

It is now commonly accepted that if records are to be captured and stored in accessible form, it requires much earlier intervention by archivists and information managers than was the case with paper records. Within government, one has seen national archives reorient themselves to focus much more than before on proactive records management, working with software developers and with records-creating agencies to influence how records are created. Archives failing to do this will struggle to maintain an accessible record of government in the late twentieth century and beyond.

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