ELECTRONIC RECORDS SEMINAR PROVIDES FORTIFICATION FOR THE INFORMATION AGE

The well-fortified City of Edmonton Archives was the site of a seminar entitled "Electronic Records: Management and Preservation", conducted on October 25-26 by Dr. Charles Dollar of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia and Peter Van Garderen, a student at SLAIS.

Electronic records can be regarded as a new field where archivists, records managers, and information technology (IT) people struggle to gain control over professional turf, and there were members of all three professions present. Dollar, an electronic records archivist with many years' experience at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., emphasized the importance of archival theory as a conceptual foundation. He pointed out that archives are an outgrowth of the need to preserve records as evidence of transactions.

Electronic records have a limited life expectancy, due to the inherent instability of their physical media and their rapidly-obsolescing technologies. Custodians of inactive electronic records are faced with a choice of three courses of action:

1. To do nothing with them (this assumes that the eventual loss of the data is acceptable),
2. To migrate the records from one medium to another every time the technology changes (which is costly and could result in loss of data with each migration), or,
3. To migrate the records to a non-electronic form such as microfilm (which Dollar recommends).

An important aspect of electronic records management is security. Records are reliable as evidence only if it can be proven that they haven't been tampered with. Peter Van Garderen demonstrated several software packages which use encryption, passwords, digital date-stamping, and compartmentalization of information as security features.

Although I didn't expect that the seminar would make me an instant expert on electronic records, it did provide some interesting and useful perspectives. Electronic records are likely to become a more important aspect of an archivist's job in the future. Managing them successfully will involve a combination of the technical expertise of IT people with the librarian-like skills of classification and subject analysis.