RECORDS IN AN ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT: DEFINITION, NATURE AND FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS OF A RECORDKEEPING SYSTEM

by Maria Guerico, Italian National Archives

In a paper aimed at identifying strategies for the long-term conservation of electronic records, the problem of defining the “record” and its essential nature unquestionably constitutes not only the first step but also the basic theoretical premise upon which the entire study is based and which should, as such, be able to draw upon the consolidated bedrock of archival science. In actual fact, however, the task of identifying a common terminology and shared set of concepts has proved far more taxing than expected despite the existence of tools both known and used for quite some time in the international context, including the Dictionary of Archival Terminology published by the International Council on Archives (ICA). Paramount among the many causes from which this difficulty stems is the fact that the technological development now under way is leading to radical changes also in the area of record creation and management. The enormous growth of tools of digital communication is rapidly transforming traditional records into electronic formats in an increasingly large number of organizations using common systems and products that are integrated at both national and international level. Such advances are already forcing those operating in the sector to apply greater stringency in formulating a set of common principles and general solutions capable of going beyond national borders and the diversity of national legal systems.
The international archival community has hitherto succeeded - albeit in anything but simple and obvious fashion - in developing a common foundation of principles, concepts and methods which maintains a low level of sharing and hence allows a high degree of adaptability and flexibility within the sphere of each national tradition. The standardization projects and programmes carried out so far have, however, proved insufficient to meet the needs of the new information society. The process of standardization induced by the new technologies means in fact that everyone is obliged to deal with the same technological tools, the same logic and the same problems, starting with an inexorable process of decentralization, a proliferation of electronic records in different formats, a progressive and alarming absence of control in internal organization, and the ever expanding integration of telecommunications and computing. Pragmatic responses have been developed on more or less all fronts, but with results of somewhat limited scope. No satisfactory solution has thus emerged so far to the basic problems, not even at the conceptual and methodological level and especially as regards the types and structure of electronic records and the consequent identification of the functional requirements of an electronic recordkeeping system. 
The greater the impact of technological advance and the greater the complexity and speed of innovation in the area of new products, the greater the urgency this need assumes. While the goal of permanently conserving electronic records may seem something of a pipe-dream today, it does constitute a costly commitment and one which cannot be fulfilled without the constant exchange of views and information coupled with a multi-disciplinary approach.
This objective calls primarily for efforts of a theoretical nature beginning necessarily with the concept of the record, its nature and the identification of its component parts. As pointed out by UBC researchers Luciana Duranti and Terry Eastwood in the first report published in the review “Archivi e computer”, “The fundamental assumption of this project is that the identification of the criteria, techniques, and methods needed to solve the problems posed by the use of electronic information systems for carrying out the ordinary business of individuals and organizations cannot derive from purely pragmatic and ad hoc decisions, but must be rooted in principles and concepts that can be applied in different situations and various contexts. In fact, information technology is bringing us closer and closer to the ‘global village’ where communication media overcome cultural and juridical differences, and, because of its nature, is cultivating universal solutions.” 
The other most significant and best known initiatives undertaken in this field also confirm the importance of the theoretical and methodological issues, albeit without always consistently drawing all the necessary consequences. The objectives of the research project developed by the University of Pittsburgh focus on two requisites which cannot be neglected in systems for the creation and management of electronic records and which require common theoretical formulation: “First, the assurance that such records satisfy the requirements for evidence and second, methods by which records can be made available over time without constant re-presentation and migration of their intellectual contents.”
The probative value of electronic records can be guaranteed together with methods to preserve their intellectual content over time only if we have a clear formulation of the archival nature of the records in question.
The ICA Committee on Electronic Records has also deemed it necessary that the Guide for Managing Electronic Records from an Archival Perspective should include a whole chapter devoted to the definition of certain key concepts: the concepts of record and electronic recordkeeping, of archival function, of record creation, appraisal, preservation and access/use. The terms “reliability” and “authenticity” have also come in for discussion and evaluation. The results of the similar efforts made by the Australian Archives in the field of definition (Keeping Electronic Records. Policy for Electronic Recordkeeping in the Commonwealth Government, Exposure Draft Version 2, September 1995) largely coincide with the findings of David Bearman and the University of Pittsburgh project, especially as regards the concepts of record and recordkeeping system.
Is it necessary - and above all possible - to achieve a substantial convergence of views within the international community as regards the concepts in question? As things now stand, full convergence does not appear to have been reached, despite the fact that the views put forward by the various groups of researchers are by no means incompatible. There is no common glossary and many issues that might appear to be of a merely preliminary nature - but actually constitute the basis for any future progress in the field - are anything but settled. The study carried out by the UBC group of researchers has produced interesting results precisely in the area of conceptual analysis and has already won widespread agreement within the international community. Prior to any detailed examination of the most important concepts, it will, however, be as well to make a number of observations on the nature of archival documents.
The ease of communicating and the apparent simplicity of safeguarding information has already led - especially in the most technologically advanced and complex organizations - to information jams building up within the system often in the absence of essential criteria serving to analyse the nature and quality of the information created and stored. The culture and knowledge of archival documents have also been thrown into disarray as a result of the radical changes imposed on creators by organizational mechanisms. While the disappearance of hierarchical structures has led to a greater degree of flexibility and motivation as well as increased speed and efficiency, it has also meant a loss of administrative points of reference as well as the need for highly simplified internal procedures that are not necessarily capable of meeting the requirements of documentation. This is a general phenomenon, albeit with different degrees of development stemming from differences in national archival traditions and legal systems. In the new organizational context, the archival document is often confused with other products of the creator’s information system, even allowing for the digital nature of the medium, with serious repercussion in terms both of the evidentiary quality of the documentation produced and conserved and of the efficiency of the information system as a whole. This confirms the need for a clear-cut answer to the original question “What is a record?”
First and foremost, it should be pointed out that the record is not recorded information, but the recorded representation of an act, produced in a specific form - the form imposed by the legal system in question - by a creator (a juridical or a physical person) in the exercise of its functions. This definition, whose validity has been recognized for centuries in the field of diplomatics, i.e. the science that studies the document with regard to its authenticity, pinpoints the fundamental elements which identify the archival document and distinguish it from a series of documents of different nature and functions, e.g. documents which have an exclusively informational function and are produced for that purpose and not in connection with any practical activity of legal significance (books, brochures, etc.).
Given its representational and probative status in legal transactions, the record thus performs a twofold function:
•	as legally valid proof of rights
•	as evidence of interests and relations, and hence support for future decision-making.
It must be recorded on a medium and formulated - as pointed out above - in accordance with the requirements imposed by the legal system. Examination of the record from this complex viewpoint highlights the inadequacy of certain broadly accepted definitions that reduce it to a combination of content, structure and context, in that these three aspects cannot be simplified and isolated and appear rather to be related to the concept of form, i.e. to the set of the record’s constitutive elements. If the content is the act represented, it does not exist in the record as such but only insofar as it manifests itself through the specific articulation of all the elements of the record itself, both physical and intellectual (or intrinsic and extrinsic, to use the terminology of diplomatics). The enacting text or purview of the specific act of which the archival document constitutes the recorded representation is only one of the elements of the logical structure.
If we examine the record from the general standpoint of its basic constitutive elements, i.e. those which must be present if the document is to perform the function for which it was created, it must be recognized that, as is asserted also by the science of diplomatics, the essential elements which must be present and clearly recognizable in a record are as follows:
•	the name of the author, generally given in traditional records in the heading (source of the record) and the subscription (person responsible for the record)
•	the act, i.e. the manifestation of the author’s will
•	the medium, which makes the record a stable object and one which can thus be recognized and identified
•	the form, i.e. the specific elements which define the record and their own form and disposition (in particular, as essential elements, the text of the act, the subscription identifying the provenance of the record, and the date establishing the time and place of its creation).
The above-mentioned functions performed by the record - which can be summarized in the aim of representing (obviously in different ways) an act arising in the course of a practical  transaction - also determine its fundamental characteristics and hence its nature and its relations. Records are not in fact individual entities but component parts of a whole connected by a bond which archival science defines as “necessary and determined” in that it stems from a common purpose and a single origin. In particular:
•	The record has no value individually as the result of a practical transaction produced during the exercise of the functions of a physical or juridical person. From the very outset, as a result of its essential nature, it stands in relation to the records that precede it and follow it. It is therefore devoid of autonomy as it loses significance and function when severed from the corpus of which it forms part.
•	The record is unique in that it is irreplaceable in the sequence of records of which it forms part (even when it is a copy). Its role and significance derive from the position it occupies in relation to the business process of which it forms part. The quality of uniqueness does not regard the record as such in its physical embodiment but the record in its relations with others. An authentic copy replacing the original or inserted into another set of records is just as unique as the original as a record is identified unambiguously by virtue of the archival bond linking it to other records.
•	The record stands in an organic relationship to other records in the sense that the process of accumulation has a structural character related to the interests and institutional objectives of the creating agency, and hence to the beginning, development and conclusion of a juridical relationship. The order of the records, i.e. the archival bond, is therefore determined ab origine and cannot be changed. In the traditional context, this bond stems from the natural and necessary accumulation of the records produced in the course of business. Specific tools are required in both the traditional and the electronic environment to ensure an orderly accumulation both at the moment of creation and with a view to conservation. These include the following: the classification scheme establishing the framework of relations between records and their accumulation with respect to the transaction in question; assignment to a particular archival unit (a file, a dossier, that is ìat the same time a logical and a physical entity) and the order of the records within the unit; the registration records for those specific series of archival units received and sent which require such procedures in order to guarantee their probative status; the arrangement of records in homogeneous groups in terms of function and transaction or form (type of record) during the concrete process of forming the archives and above all upon the transition of records from active to semi-active status.

Despite their extremely concise nature, the foregoing remarks give an idea of just how complex the function and structure of the record are and make it clear why strategies for the conservation of electronic records and technological obsolescence require consistent identification of the object in question: the individual record in terms of its constitutive elements as well as the group of records as a whole and their reciprocal relations. In an electronic context, it is in any case not only necessary to maintain the classification code for each record - which also comes to form the only element capable of establishing the correct position of the record with respect to the corpus to which it belongs and of guaranteeing the original order of the set of records - but also indispensable to conserve the data regarding the classification system as a whole, including the notes describing the nature of each level and the list of all the items forming part of the system, including those in which no records are accumulated. 
In an electronic recordkeeping system, the fundamental requirements for the preservation of records in all their integrity include in particular the conservation over time not only of the documentary entities but also of all the elements making it possible to identify and classify the relations between records (i.e. the concrete way in which the records accumulate) and the links with the specific administrative structure of which they form part. As Giorgio Cencetti, a leading Italian archivist, points out, records do not lead an autonomous life but rather find their life and meaning precisely in the concept of relationship. 
With respect to the foregoing remarks, the above-mentioned study carried out by a group of researchers of the University of British Columbia led by Luciana Duranti appears to be the most promising by virtue both of the consistency of the concepts employed and of the clear and thorough identification of the complex objectives pursued by the project:
•	“to establish what a record is in principle and how it can be recognised in an electronic environment;
•	to determine what kinds of electronic systems generate records;
•	to formulate criteria that allow for the appropriate segregation of records from all other types of information in electronic systems generating and/or storing a variety of data aggregation;
•	to define the conceptual requirements for guaranteeing the reliability and authenticity of records in electronic systems;
•	to articulate the administrative, procedural and technical methods for the implementation of those requirements; and
•	to assess those methods against different administrative, juridical, cultural and disciplinary points of view.”
It is precisely their painstaking analysis of the record and of the significance of the archival bond that has enabled our colleagues working on the UBC project to define two further concepts - as mentioned above - which are of relevance for any management system but essential in the case of an electronic system, i.e. the concepts of reliability and authenticity. The former, which is related to the moment of record creation, may give rise to some doubt in the case of legal systems - such as the Italian and the German - which are based on the absolute value of the records when it is an original and specifically in the case of public records. It is, however, of unquestionable utility both in countries with a common law system and in the broader international context, and in any case corresponds to a common need to establish the reliability of the records produced by any system. As Luciana Duranti and Terry Eastwood state, “Reliability was taken to refer to the authority and trustworthiness of records as proof and memory of the activity of which they constitute the natural by-product, that is, to their ability to stand for the facts they are about. Reliability is bestowed on a record by its form and procedure of creation, and by the trustworthiness of the persons contributing to its creation. The amount of control exercised on its form, creation procedure, and author’s competence provides the degree of reliability of a record.”
The concept of authenticity - which regards guarantees of conservation in time and space, and hence also the moment of transmission, with respect both to forgery of the original and to reproduction procedures - is unquestionably as central, if not more so, given the fact that any electronic record earmarked for conservation is involved in a series of copying and/or migration operations and hence exposed to considerable risk of alteration. The authenticity of electronic records can be ensured only in the form of authentic copies, i.e. records whose conservation is made possible through an uninterrupted sequence of reproduction and takes place in accordance with rigorously controlled procedures guaranteeing the definite identification of the author or provenance and conformity to the original. To this end, it is therefore again necessary to preserve all the tools that identify and establish the relations existing between the records, i.e. the archival bonds from which, as pointed out above, the records draw their significance.
In the ICA guide it is further pointed out that records “also need to be maintained in an available, understandable and usable manner for the length of time required” (p. 13). At the meeting of experts held in Fermo, discussion also focused on a number of other attributes to be respected with regard to conservation over time. These were partially recapitulated in the report submitted by Charles Dollar at the ACA Annual Conference held at Whitehorse in 1996: “Within this context of archival migration there are seven archival requirements that a digital technology migration strategy for electronic records must satisfy ...: readable records, identifiable records, encapsulated electronic records, retrievable records, reconstructable records, understandable records and authentic records.”
Without embarking upon a detailed discussion of this list - to which additions could certainly be made and which in any case draws together different aspects and requisites that are broadly shared by all documents and not specific to archival documents - we can simply make the following observations:
•	It is the form of the document (i.e. its constitutive elements) and the archival bond that must be preserved, regardless of format and medium.
•	Authenticity over time must be guaranteed both at the moment of the document’s transmission and use and at all subsequent phases of conservation.
The functional requirements that a recordkeeping system must fulfil also in the case of electronic records can be identified only if these prerequisites are borne clearly in mind. Such requirements do not derive their legitimacy from external sources, from the legal system in question, but from the very nature of the records. It follows that - in addition to a series of specifications of strictly technological nature common to all types of electronic documents - the system designed to conserve electronic records must provide for a series of specific requirements which must be identified by archivists and records managers and have already been listed in most cases, in particular during the presentation at Whitehorse (ACA Annual Meeting, 1996) of the study carried out jointly by the US Department of Defense and the UBC research group. The following list includes just some of the elements identified:
•	a unique identifier for each record
•	the connection of each record to its enclosures
•	the identification of the media, the format, the physical location, the network, HW and SW platforms
•	the identification of the links between the record and the act represented (registration number, classification code)
•	the definition of the preservation term
•	the preservation of the retrieval system connected to the creation system
•	the identification of criteria for the transfer of semiactive and inactive records
•	the identification of users and the definition of an access system
•	the definition of an audit trail system and a safety program
•	the definition of criteria to guarantee the records’ integrity in the migration process
In the context of the research project, many of the requirements listed are combined in the profile which accompanies each record within the system and provision is made for a specific definition of working spaces (at individual, group and general level).
To conclude, the recordkeeping system should be capable of identifying the documents unambiguously as records within the system and of linking the documents identified with the functional organization and the documentary structure of the creating agency, i.e. of classifying them and thus assigning them to a set or other archival unit as well as registering them where necessary.
Other system functions can also be provided for and implemented - e.g. a series of controlled business procedures - so as to ensure the creation of documents that are complete and valid in the form laid down by the legal system and by internal regulations.
Within the bounds of the present paper it is not possible to examine the criteria and features of a recordkeeping system in greater depth, pinpointing for example - as in the case of the University of  Pittsburgh project - also a number of essential technological aspects. In any case, the requirements indicated above are those which must be applied realistically, rationally and consistently to form the basis of each successive process of migration and future conservation of electronic records.