This week our Project
Cataloguing Archivist, Rebecca, has been in Newcastle to learn about one of
the challenges facing records professionals in the digital era…
Earlier this week I attended a fascinating conference on
‘Threats to Openness in the Digital World’ at Northumbria University.
The conference aimed to “consider and debate issues surrounding growing threats
to citizens’ rights to access public archives in the digital world.” As a body that holds public records there were some interesting points raised
that may affect LHSA in the future.
The move towards digital recordkeeping poses many issues for
archivists not least because of the hugely increased and fragmented volumes of
data, and this was the subject of the first session and a theme which ran through
the whole event. Instead of coherent and
carefully filed units of paper records, it was reiterated that digital records are often stored with
multiple versions in non-standardised shared folders, or in email chains which
are stored in multiple locations and not filed anywhere. The ease of creating
digital records means that the number of records has increased massively, and
this makes the job of the archivist much more difficult.
Potentially sensitive materials, such as those which contain
sensitive personal data such as medical information or information regarding
political affiliations, are usually reviewed prior to being made publicly
available so that the record can be closed or sections redacted, and some of
the panellists spoke of their experiences with these sensitivity reviews. With
public records, which are open under Freedom of Information legislation unless
specific exemptions apply, being able to process records is vital to determine
if they meet those exemptions or to judge if their release would breach the
Data Protection Act. Reviewing paper records can be time consuming and resource
heavy, and the challenge of scaling up the sensitivity reviewing process to
cover the massive volumes of unorganised digital records of all types that are being
produced is going to be a major challenge for records professionals in the
years to come.
Although information which could aid this process could
theoretically be embedded in digital materials from creation, it was noted that
in reality it can be difficult to persuade record creators to go through this process.
The nature of the digital environment also poses a problem for records
professionals: Determining the sensitivity of records relies heavily on
understanding the context of a record, meaning that it is not suited to automation in
the current computing context, but conversely it was highlighted that the use
of search tools hugely increases the risk of sensitive material coming to light
when it shouldn’t. Ultimately, the volume of materials and the requirement for
access could mean that blanket destruction of digital records is carried out,
if they are kept at all – a huge problem for governmental accountability, as
illustrated in a fascinating talk by Mary Daly, President of the Royal Irish
Academy, and for the archives of the future.
This is only a small part of what was covered at the
conference, which you can read more about on the Threats 2 Openness blog: https://threats2openness.wordpress.com/.
Overall it was a great event which generated lots of discussion and, after the
final session, practical action points to take forward. It is clear that a
strong recordkeeping culture is needed if we are to tackle these challenges,
but we ended on a note of optimism that we should have faith in future
technology to support our work as archivists.
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