OVERVIEW OF THE EROS (ELECTRONIC RECORDS IN OFFICE SYSTEMS) PROGRAMME   

by Ian Macfarlane

Public Record Office Objectives

The Office’s fundamental aim is:

	To assist and promote the study of the past
	through the public records
	in order to inform the present and future.

It has three supporting aims which are derived from the Public Records Acts of 1958 and 1967, under which the office functions.  They are:

i)	Selection: to safeguard the public records and ensure the selection of those of long term value.

ii)	Preservation: to acquire and preserve those records which ought to be kept.

iii)	Access: to provide access to and encourage and promote the use of, the records.

Partnership between the PRO and Departments 

In practice there is a partnership between departments and the PRO since the Public Records Act covers all records in all media, created across government and the Act places the responsibility on departments to manage their records. This partnership now needs to be extended with additional senior management and IT involvement as the Act applies equally to electronic records as it does to paper but the electronic records introduce new issues and requirements. It also means that everybody is responsible for keeping electronic records safe. 

Electronic Records

The government has for some time produced large numbers of computerised data sets, such as files of survey reports and on line application transaction databases. The fast growing trend now in terms of computer held public records, is the number of electronic documents which are replacing paper documents. These documents are held as text, spreadsheets, databases and images.

Those in charge of creating, updating, providing and preserving information will have to have electronic records policies, strategy, and facilities and procedures throughout the electronic record lifecycle.

An electronic record must be thought of as part of the corporate information.  It is crucial that future usage and preservation are taken into account at an early stage

The EROS Programme

Each year 1.5 kilometres of paper records are transferred to the PRO comprising some 11 million sheets of paper (around 1% of what the government produces in a year or totalling over 1 billion sheets of paper). However it is estimated that 95% of new documents originate from an electronic source.
   
The EROS Programme targets these electronic documents and associated records which are now created in the course of the Government’s business.  Electronic records have wide implications.  For the PRO, they will become the mainstream modern records without which there would be a late twentieth and early twenty first century ‘black hole’.  It is clear that departments are moving to place reliance on electronic records in increasing numbers of areas, using these as the primary records in place of paper files. This is particularly so where new ways of working are introduced perhaps including individuals working remotely from the office or work groups dispersed to several locations but needing to share files. In order to achieve the benefits of the new systems it will be necessary to maintain and transfer the records to the PRO in computerised form without having to commit them to large volumes of paper.

The Programme is directed by a cross government Board comprising Principal Establishment Officer, IT Director level representatives from major Departments and advisors from the CCTA.  The Board is chaired by the Keeper of the PRO and the programme manager reports to it.  The Board also liaises with CITU.

Aims of the Electronics Records in Office Systems Programme

The overall goal of the EROS Programme is:
	To ensure that electronic records of long term value, created across government, are available for future access.

The program is working on objectives in three areas

1)	Records management guidelines for departments.
	Here the PRO can act as a ‘clearing house’ to provide blueprints for best practice guidelines that can then be developed in departments without ‘reinventing the wheel’.  In this publication the results of a survey of departments are made available which show the issues and trends across government.  Case studies are included to make available some of the approaches and lessons learnt in departments.

2)	The records processes.
	The appraisal, accessioning and preservation of electronic records has to be done very differently jointly between departments and the PRO.  A working group from PRO and departments is developing appraisal guidelines currently.  To develop the accessioning and preservation processes two pilot projects have started to bring in electronic records from the Cabinet Office (Nolan Committee) and DTI ministers diaries.

3)	Long term transfer and access strategy.
	It is aimed to derive a standard to provide software suppliers and departments a way of passing records to the PRO electronically with minimum overhead and obsolescence.

October 1996