Developing a strategy for managing electronic records - The findings of the Indiana University Electronic Records Project

American Archivist

Volumn 61, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 328-364

  Bantin, Philip C ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0040112843     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.61.2.f14rth861430lk74     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. Research Issues in Electronic Records (Washington, D.C.: NHPRC, 1991).
2. The University of Pittsburgh project began in February 1993 and ended in 1996. By the time the IU project began in 1995, there was plenty of information available about the Pittsburgh requirements and specifications. The availability of this information and the growing prominence of the Pitt project were major factors in the selection of the Pitt model as the centerpiece of the IU project. Other prominent electronic records projects which the IU project team reviewed and monitored included the "Building Partnerships" project administered by the New York State Archives and Records Administration,
3. the "Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records" project administered by the faculty at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, ;
4. and the Philadelphia Electronic Records" project, The University of British Columbia (UBC) project (principal investigator Luciana Duranti) has emerged as a major and much discussed project, which many view as the most important alternative approach to the Pittsburgh model. In truth, the IU project team never considered testing and evaluating the UBC strategy. This decision was not based on any analysis or review of the merits of the UBC project. Rather it was based largely on the lack of substantial information on the UBC project when formative decisions were being made about the objectives of the IU project
5. All the products of the IU Electronic Records Project can be found on the project's homepage at ..
6. The homepage for the Pittsburgh Electronic Records project can be found at .
7. "David Bearman, "Item Level Control and Electronic Recordkeeping," Archives and Museum Informatics 10, No. 3 (1996): 207
8. Bearman, "Item Level Control and Electronic Recordkeeping," 208, and from introductory comments to the metadata specifications which can be found on the Pittsburgh Electronics Records Project homepage.
9. One of the most influential, earliest endorsements of a functional approach was David Bearman and Richard Lytle, "The Power of the Principle of Provenance," Archivaria 21 (Winter 1985-86): 14-27.
10. One of the earliest applications of functional appraisal was Joan K. Haas, Helen Willa Samuels, and Barbara Trippel Simmons, Appraising the Records of Modern Science and Technology: A Guide (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1985).
11. This methodology was later applied within a university setting in Helen Willa Samuels, Varsity Letters: Documenting Modern Colleges and Universities (Metuchen, N.J.: Society of American Archivists and Scarecrow Press, 1992);
12. to the documentation of high-technology companies in Bruce Bruemmer and Sheldon Hochheiser, The High-Technology Company: A Historical Research and Archive Guide (Minneapolis: Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Process, University of Minnesota, 1989)
13. and for health care institutions in Joan D. Krizack, Documentation Planning for the U.S. Health Care System (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1994).
14. For articles advocating a functional approach for electronic records see especially Terry Cook, "Electronic Records, Paper Minds: The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Post- Custodial and Post-Modernist Era," Archives and Manuscripts 22 (November 1994): 300-328;
15. Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift," Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997): 17-63;
16. Margaret Hedstrom, "Descriptive Practices for Electronic Records: Deciding What is Essential and Imagining What is Possible," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993): 53-63;
17. David Bearman, "Archival Strategies," American Archivist 58 (Fall 1995): 380-413;
18. David Bearman, "Diplomatics, Weberian Bureaucracy, and the Management of Electronic Records in Europe and America," in David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1994), 261-66;
19. Greg O'Shea, "The Medium is NOT the Message: Appraisal of Electronic Records by the Australian Archives," Archives and Manuscripts 22 (May 1994): 68-93;
20. and the Australian Archives homepage, "Keeping Electronic Records" at .
21. For discussions of the evolution of the concept of the record and redefinitions of the term see Richard Cox, "The Record: Is it Evolving?" The Records and Retrieval Report 10 (March 1994): 1-16;
22. Richard Cox, "The Record in the Information Age: A Progress Report on Research," The Records and Retrieval Report 12 (January 1996): 1-16;
23. David Roberts, "Defining Electronic Records, Documents and Data," Archives and Manuscripts 22 (May 1994): 14-26;
24. Glenda Ackland, "Managing the Record Rather than the Relic," Archives and Manuscripts 20 (1992): 57-63;
25. Sue McKemmish, "Are Records Ever Actual?" in The Records Continuum, Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years, edited by Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott (Clayton, Victoria: Ancora Press, 1994), 187-203;
26. David Bearman, "Managing Electronic Mail," in Electronic Evidence, 188-91;
27. Charles Dollar, Archival Theory and Information Technologies: The Impact of Information Technologies on Archival Principles and Methods (Macerata, Italy: University of Macerata, 1992), 45-48;
28. the Australian Archives homepage, "Keeping Electronic Records" (see footnote 9 for the URL).
29. " This definition can be found in several of Bearman's writings, but see especially "Archival Principles and the Electronic Office," in Electronic Evidence, 147;
30. and "Item Level Control and Electronic Recordkeeping," 212-14.
31. The Australian archival community has been particularly active in defining and refining the recordkeeping concept. See Sue McKemmish, "Recordkeeping, Accountability and Continuity: The Australian Reality," in Archival Documents: Providing Accountability Through Recordkeeping, edited by Sue McKemmish and Frank Upward (Melbourne: Ancora Press, 1993), 9-26;
32. Greg O'Shea and David Roberts, "Living in Digital World: Reorganizing the Electronic and Post-Custodial Realities," Archives and Manuscripts 24 (November 1996): 286-311;
33. the Australian Archives homepage, "Keeping Electronic Records" (see footnote 9 for the URL);
34. and the Australian Archives homepage, "Managing Electronic Records-A Shared Responsibility" at .
35. For a good discussion of these issues see Dollar, Archival Theory and Information Technologies, 35-48.
36. For a discussion of this concept see Samuels, Varsity Letters, 1-17.
37. "' Critics of the functional model and the emphasis on records as evidence and sources of accountability have argued that this strategy does not identify and retain the records essential for secondary research. IU project personnel support those archivists who argue that an emphasis on documenting functions and providing evidence does not exclude the retention of records which support broader historical, societal, and cultural uses. Several archivists have suggested how this might be achieved. Terry Cook suggests that it is not a "search for research value per se, but rather the articulation of the most important societal structures, functions, records creators, and recordscreating processes, and their interaction, which together form a comprehensive reflection of human experience." Terry Cook, "Mind over Matter: Towards a New Theory of Archival Appraisal," in The Archival Imagination: Essays in Honour of Hugh A. Taylor, edited by Barbara L. Craig (Ottawa: Association of Canadian Archivists, 1992), 41.
38. Cook has labeled this strategy "macro-appraisal," which he defines as an approach "of mirroring societal values through the functions of the record creator that focuses research instead on records creators rather than directly on society, on the assumption that those creators, and those citizens and organizations with whom they interact, indirectly represent the collective functioning of society." Cook, "What is Past is Prologue," 31.
39. Angelika Menne-Haritz, on the other hand, argues that documentation or acquisition strategies designed to document society or to provide a true image of society by means of ranking creators or functions will not be effective. Rather she argues that the goal or the means of making the decision-making processes evident is to "make evidence accessible . . . enable the evidence to be laid open and . . . give all users the chance to interpret the evidence in their own way, giving others the chance to follow their own arguments or interpret the sources differently." Consequently, Menne-Haritz argues that "evidence is an aim, not a tool, for archival appraisal." Angelika Menne- Haritz, "Appraisal or Documentation: Can We Appraise Archives by Selecting Content," American Archivist 57 (Summer 1994): 541.
40. Helen Samuels and Tim McGovern at MIT have also developed an electronic records management strategy based on risk assessment. In a paper on the topic, they wrote "Risks are particularly great when employees in the organization do not recognize that records are, or should be created, as a consequence of transactions." Helen Samuels and Tim McGovern, unpublished paper, "Managing Electronic Evidence: A Risk Management Perspective," (1996).
41. Margaret Hedstrom made this observation in a presentation on "Research Issues in Migration and Long-Term Preservation" at a Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research held in Pittsburgh in May 1997.
42. The author wishes to thank David Bearman for reminding him of this point. In an e-mail message to the author dated 12 August 1998, Bearman wrote: "That's the whole point of the [Pitt] model- these requirements, which are dictated by being a logical consequence of the attributes that we associate with evidence, are necessarily and correctly implemented differently in different situations because they are applied to different assessments of risk from different quarters." 3 For example, the Dublin Core Element Set identifies a core set of fifteen metadata elements which are needed to facilitate discovery of electronic resources. For more detail on the Dublin Core Metadata see the project's homepage at .
43. For another interpretation of the value of the Pitt Functional Requirements, see the "Functional Requirements to Ensure the Creation, Maintenance, and Preservation of Electronic Records" created by the Center for Technology in Government of the New York State Archives and Records Administration. Its most recent functional requirements model contains three primary categories rather than the five advocated by the Pitt model. The New York State model can be found at .
44. An excellent source on functional decomposition is James Martin, Information Engineering (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall, 1989).
45. An outstanding source on the methodology used in information systems analysis and design is Edward Yourdon, Modern Structured Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Yourdon Press, 1989).
46. A useful source on data modeling is G. Lawrence Sanders, Data Modeling (Danvers, Mass.: Boyd & Fraser Pub. Co., 1995).
47. An extensive body of literature has been generated to identify the skills archivists will need to function effectively in the twenty-first century. In particular see Margaret Hedstrom, "Teaching Archivists About Electronic Records and Automated Techniques: A Needs Assessment," American Archivist 56 (Summer 1993): 424-33;
48. and Tom Nesmith, '"Professional Education in the Most Expansive Sense': What Will the Archivist Need to Know in the Twenty-First Century," Archivaria 42 (Fall 1996): 89-94.
49. The author's experiences regarding the priorities of the IT community were reinforced in a recent e-mail discussion with Robert Horton of the Minnesota State Archives. Horton wrote that "evidence per se does not have any immediate resonance with our collaborators, so it can't be used as a starting point or as given. It's not a motivating force or a familiar concept to them so far, it's outside their experience." Quote taken from an e-mail message from Robert Horton to Philip Bantin, 5 June 1998.
50. For more information on the Philadelphia project, see its homepage at .
51. For a different version of the MEO approach see Jeff Rothenberg's article "Metadata to Support Data Quality and Longevity" which can be found at . Instead of encapsulating all metadata as Rothenberg recommends, another metadata strategy suggests storing the majority of the metadata items in a separate database and linking the record to the metadata via direct links or pointers to the location of the documentation.
52. Prominent strategies include: 1) extracting the metadata from existing documents-a strategy known as "Data Mining;" 2) manufacturing the metadata and attaching it to the records-a strategy known as "Data Harvesting;" and 3) designing systems which automatically "harvest" pertinent metadata-another type of "Data Harvesting. " 36 Margaret Hedstrom makes this same point in Electronic Records Research and Development: Final Report of the 1996 Conference held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, fune 28-29, 1996 (Ann Arbor, 1997), 37.