The protection of the integrity of electronic records: An overview of the UBC-MAS research project

Archivaria

Volumn 42, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 46-67

  Duranti, Luciana ^a   MacNeil, Heather ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0007234497     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. The UBC research team comprises Luciana Duranti as principal investigator, Terry Eastwood as coinvestigator, and Heather MacNeil as research assistant.
2. Luciana Duranti and Terry Eastwood, "Protecting Electronic Evidence: A Progress Report, " Arclzivi & Conzputer 5, no. 3 (1995), p. 214, hereafter First Progress Report.
3. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
4. Progress reports have been issued by members of the research team at various stages in the project. See Duranti and Esatwood, "First Progress Report, " pp. 213-50.
5. "First Progress Report, " pp. 214-15.
6. "First Progress Report, " pp. 214-15.
7. Although valid for managing non-corporate (i.e., personal) fonds, the model would have to be much more simplified because considerations of administrative and public accountability do not impinge on individuals in the same way they impinge on corporate bodies. For example, the reliability and authenticity of a record created by a private person will be determined in relation to its form, not its procedure of creation or its transmission. Such authenticity will only be tested when the individual record is presented for some specific purpose.
8. The activity and entity models, the glossary, and the rules associated with the activities are available for viewing at the UBC-MAS Research Project home page at http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/duranti.
9. Semi-active records fall within the purview of both the recordkeeping system and the record-preservation system. The recordkeeping system is concerned with semi-active records as they relate to active records and the carrying out of the actions for which the records were created. The record-preservation system, on the other hand, is concerned more generally with locating, retrieving, and preserving semi-active records for the creator's reference purposes.
10. An authentic copy is "a copy certified by officials authorized to execute such a function, so as to render it legally admissible as evidence. " See Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science, " Archivaria 28 (Summer 1989), p. 21.
11. Garth Graham, Cornelius F. Burk, and Henry E. McCandless, "Governance and Information: Myths, Realities and the Future, " Canadian Parlirtnzentary Review (Winter 1994), pp. 1-6.
12. Garth Graham, Cornelius F. Burk, and Henry E. McCandless, "Governance and Information: Myths, Realities and the Future, " Canadian Parlirtnzentary Review (Winter 1994), pp. 1-6.
13. The superscription is "the mention of the name of the author of the document and/or the action. See Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science (Part V):' Arcizivaria 32 (Summer 1991), p. 12.
14. "First Progress Report, " pp. 214-15.
15. Garth Graham, Cornelius F. Burk, and Henry E. McCandless, "Governance and Information: Myths, Realities and the Future, " Canadian Parlirtnzentary Review (Winter 1994), pp. 1-6.
16. Competence is a sphere of functional responsibility entrusted to an office or officer.
17. Access privileges refer to the authority to compile, classify, annotate, read, retrieve, transfer, and destroy records, granted to offers within an agency.
18. Giorgio Cencetti, "ll fondamento teorico della dottrina archivistica:' Archivi 11, VI (1939), p. 8, reprinted in Giorgio Cencetti, Scritti archivistici (Rome, 1970). p. 39.
19. Jenkins uses the term "interrelatedness. " See Hilary Jenkinson, "Introductory, " in Public Record Office, Guide to the Public Records, Part I (London, 1949), p. 2.
20. In many European countries, the registration of incoming and outgoing records in a register has, for centuries, ensured reliability by tracking all the records sent and received by an agency and, within that scope, mapping all the actions associated with a matter and the way it was disposed. In the UBC-MAS project, the establishment of registration procedures, which include maintaining an electronic protocol register, has been identified as one of the rules of the recordkeeping system. As an instrument of documentary control, the protocol register is designed to serve both records management and accountability purposes. At the same time, it is a valuable instrument for capturing documentary context, since it reflects the relations among all the records that have entered and exited the agency.
21. For a more detailed discussion of these concepts, see Luciana Duranti, "Reliability and Authenticity: The Concepts and Their Implications, " Archivcrria 39 (Spring 1993, pp. 5-10.
22. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
23. The routing of electronic records involves establishing the boundaries of general, group, and individual space within the electronic system by defining in which of these spaces records may be made, received, registered, classified, revised, stored, and so on.
24. See Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses For An Old Science (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990-91). pp. 14-19.
25. Reliability, it should be pointed out, is also a matter of degree. The methods identified by the UBCMAS research team are designed to achieve the maximum degree of reliability. Individual record creators will have to determine for themselves the degree of reliability required for each type of record created, depending on the business purposes the record serves and the legal requirements associated with it. The methods described here will be, necessarily, selectively applied.
26. This is of course a responsibility involving supervision over and accountability for the technical work.
27. The detailed rules developed by the project may be found on the World Wide Web home page of the project and in the third and fourth progress reports on the project published in Archivi & Computer 6, nos. 2 and 7.
28. The records system and its components are defined earlier in this article. See pp. 46-57.
29. For a more detailed discussion of the research project's findings as they relate to the top-down perspective of archival description, see Heather MacNeil, "Implications of the UBC Research Results for Archival Description in General and the Rules for Archival Description in Particular, " Archivi & Computer 6, nos. 3-4 (1996). pp. 239-46.
30. Protecting authenticity may even run counter to narrowly-defined agency interests. A recent example is the alleged tampering and destruction of documents by the Department of National Defence relating to the 1993 torture death of a Somalian at the hands of members of the Canadian Armed Forces in Somalia.
31. Garth Graham, Cornelius F. Burk, and Henry E. McCandless, "Governance and Information: Myths, Realities and the Future, " Canadian Parlirtnzentary Review (Winter 1994), pp. 1-6.
32. The main features of the continuum approach as it has developed in North America are outlined in Jay Atherton, "From Life Cycle to Continuum: Some Thoughts on the Records Management-Archives Relationship, " Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985-86). pp. 43-5 I.
33. David Bearman, "Item Level Control and Electronic Recordkeeping, " paper delivered to the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, San Diego, California (29 August 1996), p. 23.
34. Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science. (Part IV), " Archivaria 31 (Winter 1990). p. 14.
35. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between metadata and archival description, see Heather MacNeil, "Metadata Strategies and Archival Description: Comparing Apples to Oranges, " Archivaria 39 (Spring 1995), pp. 22-32.
36. Richard J. Cox, "Putting the Puzzle Together: The Recordkeeping Functional Requirements Project at the University of Pittsburgh.
37. The methods adopted by the Pittsburgh research team have been discussed by Seamus Ross in his "Commentary on the Pittsburgh University Recordkeeping Requirements Project: A Progress Report (Delivery Draft), " a paper presented at the Society of American Archivists' Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. (September 1995).
38. The functional requirements are justified on the basis of "cultural warrant" and validated on the basis of case studies of "organizational culture. " The investigations of both cultural warrant and organizational culture focus exclusively on American recordkeeping practices and requirements. See Richard J. Cox, ed., "University of Pittsburgh Recordkeeping Functional Requirements Project: Reports and Working Papers, " (Pittsburgh, September 1994, March 1995).
39. Although the concept of record is clearly central to the Pittsburgh Project, it is somewhat difficult to locate in the literature presenting it a clearly identifiable definition of record. Records are sometimes described as "recorded transactions providing evidence" and at other times as "evidence of transactions. " See Richard J. Cox, ed., Univer. sity of Pittsburgh Recordkeeping Functional Requirements Pmject: Reports and Working Papers (Pittsburgh, September 1994, March 1995), passim. In the first formallypublished mention of the Pittsburgh Project, David Bearman, who served as the consultant to the Project, defines an electronic record as "information that participates in 'transactions'. " See David Bearman, "The Implications of Armstrong v. Executive [sic] of the Presidenr for the Archival Management of Electronic Records, " American Archivist 56, no. 4 (Fall 1993). p. 683. Despite these slight differences in wording, the definitions are consistent in their focus on the concepts of "evidence" and "transaction" as the defining features of a record. A single, standard definition of each of these concepts does not appear to have been developed for the purposes of the Pittsburgh Project. In the glossary developed for the purposes of the UBC-MAS project, record is defined as "any document created by a physical or juridical person in the course of practical activity. " Key terms used in the definition, e.g., document, juridical person, are also given separate definitions in the glossary. See Appendix C, "Third Progress Report" or view the UBC-MAS Research Project home page.
40. In a commentary delivered at a session on the Pittsburgh Project at the 1995 meeting of the Society of American Archivists, (Washington, D.C., 31 August 1995). P.C. Hariharan discussed some of the inadequacies of the project's method of defining functional requirements.
41. Personal fonds containing electronic records will be more easily accommodated in the proposed project since it will adopt the point of view of the archivist preserving the records. The point of view of the creator of the records is not relevant to the purposes of the proposed project.