Trusting Records: Legal, Historical and Diplomatic Perspectives

Citation

Williams, C. (2002), "Trusting Records: Legal, Historical and Diplomatic Perspectives", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 1, pp. 136-139. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.1.136.14

The purpose of this volume is twofold. It aims to explore the trustworthiness of records as evidence over time from the perspectives of law and history and sets out to test the success of recent attempts to validate electronic records through the application of traditional diplomatic concepts and principles. It is a revised version of a doctoral dissertation undertaken within the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). It was supervised by Luciana Duranti whose own research in this field has led to the rekindling internationally of interest in the potential contribution of diplomatics in the creation of reliable and authentic electronic records.

The book is organised into four chapters. Chapter 1 discusses how records have been assessed for trustworthiness over time, both by the legal and historical professions; Chapter 2 considers the current criteria for assessing records as legal evidence in the Canadian environment; Chapter 3 looks at modern methods of assessing records as historical evidence and how these have been challenged by the advent of electronic records; and the final chapter contains a discussion of the “historical science” of diplomatics based on its potential for supplying a standard for ensuring the trustworthiness of all records, and specifically digital ones.

Some definitions may be in order. Diplomatics (or rather “diplomatic” in the UK tradition) is described by Christopher Brooke as having a reputation as a formidable and dismal science, “a kind of game played by a few scholars, most of them medievalists, harmless so long as it does not dominate or obscure historical enquiry”. He says it is “a formal science by definition – the study of the forms of documents, of every age, including the present [my italics], and every continent and every type susceptible of formal investigation”. Jean Mabillon, whose De re diplomatica, published in 1681, marks the birth of this science, said it established “certain and accurate terms by which authentic instruments can be distinguished from spurious, and certain and genuine ones from uncertain and suspect ones”. Its use is thus as an analytical technique for determining the authenticity of records.

A trustworthy record is defined as being both reliable – that it is capable of standing for the facts to which it attests – and authentic – that the record is in fact what it claims to be. This book describes a shift in the criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of records as legal evidence away from the authority of the personal observer and recorder of an event towards the authority of bureaucratic controls, and from the authority of the original record to the authority of the system in which the records are generated and maintained. The shift in criteria for trusting records as historical records is shown as one which moved from the assumption that a document would reveal the past as it actually happened, through to the postmodern view that denied the reality of the past apart from what the historian chose to make of it. In the face of the electronic revolution some historians believe that the computer, in capturing metadata, enhances the authenticity of records and that dialogue between records creators is crucial, while others claim that such a dialogue would undermine the desire of the historian to unpick the unstated and to worm his way into “the subtext and assumptions behind the presented image”.

The final section of the book describes the standards and rules defined by the UBC project (described below) for what constitutes a complete, reliable and authentic record in an electronic environment and how these are relevant to record creators, lawyers and historians alike.

Whether the methodologies suggested will in time supply a universal standard for the creation and maintenance of reliable and authentic electronic records remains to be seen. However, this volume is fascinating in its own right, both as a historical investigation and also in supporting Duranti’s view of the relevance of diplomatics to the digital age. But its value is enhanced when it is viewed alongside other research projects. It fed into a particular research project undertaken at UBC 1994‐1997 entitled “The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records” which defined requirements for creating reliable and authentic electronic records in active records systems in which the diplomatic inheritance is clearly evident. This has led to an international project currently addressing the long‐term preservation of inactive electronic records, the InterPARES Project, an acronym for International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems. Others on the quest for ensuring the integrity of electronic records include the University of Pittsburgh Project carried out 1993‐1996 under the direction of Richard Cox and David Bearman which encompassed the whole record‐keeping continuum, both active and inactive. It embodied a similar aim: to develop and test functional requirements for evidence in electronic record‐keeping systems, but from a different perspective – less the “document” based approach of UBC, than a “contextual” approach where the emphasis was less on the “transaction” that the document evidences than on the organisational context of the office which generated it – and which may be equally important in defining reliability and authenticity.

The UK government too is engaged in a similar task, and here the Public Record Office is a leader in collaboration with the Office of the E‐envoy (formerly the government’s Central IT Unit). The modernising government agenda has enormous implications for records managers and archivists: “by 2004 all newly created public records will be electronically stored and retrieved”. Work on establishing the requirements for electronic records systems in government departments in the UK was published last year in Modernising Government. Framework for Information Age Government: Electronic Records Management. Underpinning this are standards whose titles alone demonstrate their endorsement of those with which this volume is so engaged: A Code of Practice for Legal Admissibility and Evidential Weight of Information Stored Electronically (PD 0008) and The Principles of Good Practice for Information Management (PD0010).

This is an extremely useful book, hampered only slightly by an occasional denseness of language and a rather sparse index, and has relevance for a wide constituency of professionals. It adds significantly to the literature on a subject which is under‐represented in the English language and brings to it the tradition and culture of European archival education and training. In differing significantly in important areas (not least in the definition of records itself) from that derived from the Anglo‐American and Australian record‐keeping traditions it can only add to the richness of the dialogue.