The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records: An Overview of the UBC-MAS Research Project

The research project currently underway at the University of British Columbia's Master of Archival Studies Programme is directed toward identifying and defining the requirements for creating, handling, and preserving reliable and authentic electronic records. This article provides an overview of the research project, outlining its objectives and methodology, summarizing its conceptual analysis, and presenting its major findings to date. It is generally recognized that, while computer technology makes the production, transmission, manipulation, organization, maintenance, and consultation of records easier, faster, and cheaper, it also represents a threat to their integrity, accessibility, and preservation. The difficulties associated with making and keeping trustworthy records in electronic form provided the justification for a three year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) funded research project which began in April 1994 and which will conclude in March 1997. The research project, which is being carried out by a research team from the Master of Archival Studies Programme at the University of British Columbia,' "aims to identify and define in a purely theoretical way both the byproducts of electronic information systems and the methods for protecting the integrity [meaning the reliability and authenticity] of those which constitute evidence of action."' The objectives of the research project are: THE PR(ITECTI0N OF THE INTEGRITY OF ELECTRONIC RECORDS 47 to establish what a record is in principle and how it can be recognized in an electronic environment; to determine what kind 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 aggregations; 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.? At the conclusion of the project, the final findings of the research will be examined in detail in a monograph illustrating as well the project's methodology and hypotheses. The purpose of the present article is threefold: firstly, to outline the methodological framework of the research project; secondly, to summarize the conceptual analysis of records, reliability, and authenticity that formed the core of the research; and, thirdly, to present the project's major findings deriving from that conceptual analysis, while suggesting some of their broader implications for the archival management of electronic record^.^ The methodological approach of the research project was primarily deductive, that is, it began with a set of general premises about the nature of records and then examined those premises to determine whether they were supportable in an electronic environment. The theoretical basis for the general premises concerning the nature of records and the conditions necessary for ensuring their trustworthiness were the principles and concepts of diplomatics, which studies records as individual entities, and archival science, which studies records as aggregations. Diplomatics is a body of concepts and methods, originally developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, "for the purpose of proving the reliability and authenticity of documents." Over the centuries, it has evolved "into a very sophisticated system of ideas about the nature of records, their genesis and composition, their relationships with the actions and persons connected to them, and with their organizational, social, and legal c~n tex t . "~ Archival science, which emerged out of diplomatics in the nineteenth century, is a body of concepts and methods directed toward the study of records in terms of their documentary and functional relationships and the ways in which they are controlled and communicated. During the course of the research, the principles and concepts of diplomatics were integrated with those of archival science and interpreted within the framework of electronic systems. This conceptual analysis generated a number of hypotheses expressing the necessary and sufficient components of a complete, reliable, and authentic electronic record. These hypotheses, which have been articulated in template^,^ constitute the conceptual basis for establishing, firstly, whether a given electronic system contains records and, secondly, whether these records can be considered reliable and authentic. In order to translate the hypotheses into functional requirements for the creation, handling, and preservation of reliable and authentic records, it was necessary to explicate those concepts in implementable terms. It was fortunate, therefore, to find that the U.S. Department of Defense Records Management Task Force (DoDRMTF) was actively seeking a theoretical foundation for its re-engineering effort. The DoDRMTF contributed to the UBC-MAS research methodology its own standard modelling technique, Integrated Definition language (IDEF), which was useful for the purposes of analyzing and graphically representing the diplomatic and archival concepts, and making their meaning comprehensible and relevant to system designers. The templates developed by the UBC-MAS research team provided the concepts to be represented, while IDEF provided the means of translating those concepts into activity and entity models that show the relationships of their components from well identified viewpoints7 and for determined purposes. For the aims of the UBC-MAS research project, the viewpoint chosen was that of the record creator and, more specifically, a corporate body, primarily because of the project's focus on reliability and authenticity. The activity models define all the activities associated with the records management function. That function has been labelled MANAGE ARCHIVAL FONDS and it includes all the activities associated with the creation, handling, and preservation of active and semi-active records. The entity model defines all the entities associated with those activities, e.g., OFFICE, CLASS, PROCEDURE, DOSSIER, RECORD, as well as their attributes (i.e., characteristics or properties) and the relationships between and among them. The activity and entity models describe the creation, handling, and preservation of an agency's records, both electronic and nonelectronic. On the basis of the activities identified in the models, the research team, in collaboration with the DoDRMTF, has also developed detailed rules for creating, handling, and preserving those r ec~ rds .~ Before proceeding to the conceptual analysis of records, which constituted the core of the research, it is necessary to explain briefly the records management framework in which that analysis has been situated. The diplomatic and archival principles and concepts that have been elaborated and interpreted for the purposes of the research project function as standards for the design of recordkeeping and record-preservation systems, and for the evaluation of the records produced, used, maintained, and preserved over the long term in electronic form. A recordkeeping system comprises a set of internally consistent rules that govern the making, receiving, setting aside, and handling of active and semi-active records in the usual and ordinary course of the creator's affairs, and the tools and mechanisms used to implement them. In other words, recordkeeping is "keeping record of action": as such, it is the presupposition for the existence and the first object of records management, which is the management over time, from the creator's perspective and for its purposes, of the creator's records, of the means used to control their creation (e.g., classification, registration, and retrieval instruments), and of the human, technological, and space resources necessary to their handling, maintenance, and preservation. Although the management is from the perspective of the creator and for its purposes, it serves broader social aims that go beyond the carrying out of specific affairs, encompassing legal requirements, administrative accountability, social accountability, and historical accountability. The record-preservation system is a set of internally consistent rules that govern the intellectual and physical maintenance by the creator of semi-active and inactive records THE PROTECTION OF THE INTEGRITY OF ELECTRONIC RECORDS 49 over time, and the tools and mechanisms necessary to implement them.Y The records system of the creator thus comprises the creator's records, and its recordkeeping and record-preservation systems, and is controlled by the creator's records management function. Within the framework just described, the conceptual analysis of records focused on the definition of three key terms: record, reliability, and authenticity. The research team began its work by identifying and defining the components of a record in a traditional and in an electronic environment using concepts derived primarily from diplomatics. At the heart of diplomatics lies the idea that all records can be analyzed, understood, and evaluated in terms of a system of formal elements that are universal in their application and decontextualized in nature. This implies that records can and must be identified by their formal constituents, and not by the information they convey. Diplomatic examination shows that an electronic record, just like every traditional record, is comprised of medium (the physical carrier of the message), form (the rules of representation that allow for the communication of the message), persons (the entities acting by means of the record), action (the exercise of will that originates the record as a means of creating, maintaining, ch