The Way it was
Imagine a tree. Then, picture a forest bursting with trees. Now imagine that forest clear cut to make pulp for the paper industry. Not a happy thought, is it? But step back a moment and think how many trees and how many forests have been spared thanks to electronic documents. Can you see how that forest has been replanted, how it's thriving today? Feel better? You should, you helped play a part, whether your realize it or not. Just when it seemed like we had that situation under control a new problem surfaced. Everyone could produce and save his or her own documents. Wonderful, …right? Well, not so much it turns out. What was to be done with all of those documents out there? Who would manage them? Who was to create the standards? Who could enforce them? For knowledge managers, documentation specialists and archivists, the problem and the mountain of documents grew and grew like those newly planted trees. "Oh, to be that tree," we thought, "without a care in the world"!
The good news was that there was lot of help out there. Adobe developed the Portable Document Format, the venerable PDF, and eventually we had a tool to render authentic, reliable, complete, unaltered and, most importantly, usable documents. Adobe started the fire, and then innovative newcomers like Adlib Software fanned the flames by creating powerful solutions that automatically rendered documents from virtually any file source into fully-searchable PDFs. Add on extras like watermarking, metadata stamping and Table of Contents generation and the archivist's problem was solved, right?
Too Much of a Good Thing
Not surprisingly, nothing is ever that simple. The more powerful PDF creation tools have become, the taller the mountain of documents has grown. Now, virtually any kind of document can be and is rendered to PDF. Engineering drawings, annual reports, and fillable forms - if you can put it on paper, you can render it to PDF. Some of these documents can be several gigabytes in size with the addition of audio and video clips. It's not uncommon for these massive documents to contain almost no metadata at all. It might be a gorgeous document for the marketing team, but to your archivists and their document servers, it's nothing less than a nightmare.
As one might expect, archivists have known of these problems for quite some time. Other groups became aware as a result of expanding demands for electronic submission, internet search and retrieval, and other technology that stimulates the creation of electronic documents. In an ideal world, archivists want files based on nonproprietary and stable technology which is suitable for recordkeeping guidelines issued to producers (e.g., guidance for records creation, maintenance, and disposition). In addition, files must support metadata for access, provenance, and preservation.
As more and more governments and businesses adopt electronic recordkeeping practices, a long-term solution is needed to ensure that electronic documents remain accessible for long periods of time - in some cases as permanent archival records. What these records-intensive organizations and institutions demand is a reliable storage system that protects document data and its visual reproduction over the long-term and does so according to rigorous, internationally recognized standards.
Archiving Best Practices
A rational and successful record retention and archival strategy demands that records be genuine, accurate, complete and productive, and that the systems that support the strategy remain viable over time. To be genuine, there must be a way to verify that the record is what it says it is. Stamping an electronic document with metadata - "data about data" - based on workflow rules and creating electronic signatures are common ways of establishing a document's validity. There are products on the market that can perform these functions automatically thus adding yet another check against a record's authenticity.
The ability to trust in a document's accuracy is essential for an effective records retention program, particularly when dealing with the details of a transaction event. The same applies for completeness. An archived record cannot be truncated or expurgated in any way, whether deliberately or as a result of file compression. Both the data and the metadata must be preserved in their entirety, ideally captured directly from the source.
