The greatest threat we face is the nonchalance with which people treat electronic records. We've already lost the last five generations of electronic records. The few we have cannot be proven reliable or authentic. Adding urgency is a recent U.S. court decision that ruled a printout of an e-mail is not a valid or even a complete copy of a record. E-mails must be kept in electronic form to be considered authentic.
More challenges lie ahead.
As technologies change, records will have to be migrated to new systems, and every time you do that, you may lose up to 40 per cent of the original information. In her latest project, Duranti is heading up an international team that is looking at the problems of setting international policies, procedures and standards for the long-term preservation of authentic electronic records. This page maintained by Public Affairs . Last updated March 4, 1998.