New Mexico Administrative Code › Title 1 - GENERAL GOVERNMENT ADMINISTRATION › Chapter 13 - PUBLIC RECORDS › Part 3 - MANAGEMENT OF ELECTRONIC RECORDS › Section 1.13.3.11 - SYSTEM RELIABILITY, THE CREATION AND CAPTURE OF ELECTRONIC RECORDS AND THE MAINTENANCE AND ACCESSIBILITY OF THE RECORDS

Current through Register Vol. 35, No. 13, July 16, 2024
A. The electronic records system should be
				administered and configured with the best practices in mind for information and
				resource management to ensure the reliability of the records being produced.
				Towards this goal of reliability the life cycle of the records shall be taken
				into account where some records may finite life spans others may have an
				indefinite life may have to be viewed or regenerated forever. To this end there
				are four aspects: preservation- the information shall be in a form that can be
				physically preserved; the information shall possess the quality of
				accessibility; the information shall be able to be read (readability); and the
				information shall retain its comprehensibility - to be read and understood in
				their original context without question.
(1)
				Information shall be physically preserved. The information in an electronic
				system shall be preserved in a physical media that is of sufficient quality and
				capacity to contain the information being preserved. There are many ways to
				accomplish this and the commission of public records (state records center and
				archives) does not endorse, warrant, certify, or approve any particular
				hardware or software product or product combination used in any electronic
				records management activity. The implementation of these processes, including
				the specifications for products used therein, remains at the discretion of the
				individual public agency. However, the records should be full and accurate to
				the extent necessary to: facilitate action by current and future employees, at
				all levels; allow for proper scrutiny of the conduct of business by anyone
				authorized to undertake such scrutiny; and protect the financial, legal and
				other rights of the agency, its clients and anyone else affected by its actions
				and decisions. The agency shall provide convincing, documented evidence that
				the electronic records were created, protected, and otherwise managed in
				accordance with systems and procedures designed to ensure the reliability,
				accuracy, and security of both the records and the process or system used to
				produce the records. Many paper records are being eliminated when the
				information has been placed on magnetic, optical, or other data processing
				media. In these cases, the information on the data processing medium shall be
				retained for the length of time specified in records retention and disposition
				schedules and is subject to the same confidentiality and access restrictions as
				paper records.
(2) Information
				shall be accessible. When conducting transactions electronically, the first
				challenge is to maintain records in a way that will enable retrieval of all
				documents relevant to a transaction when they are needed. The second challenge
				is to ensure that the records are not retained for any longer than necessary,
				in order to avoid both overloading systems and to avoid indiscriminate dumping.
				A special problem with electronic records is that they lack familiar physical
				and visual clues about their origins, such as official letterhead, or their
				authenticity, such as written signatures. Special measures shall be taken to
				ensure that they are also reliable and authentic. Paper record-keeping systems
				have traditionally been employed to file letters, minutes, reports,
				spreadsheets, invoices, notes, etc. These systems employ classified and indexed
				files at a subject or transaction level to consolidate and co-locate the
				documents generated or received in the course of a business activity. Separate
				folders provide a business context and link the individual documents to a
				particular transaction and into the wider agency record-keeping system. In
				recent years, agencies have adopted records management, document management,
				workflow and imaging software. Regardless of the technology, however, the
				objective remains the same: capture records so that they can be easily
				retrieved at a later date, understood, and interpreted as evidence of what
				transpired in an agency.
(a) the record shall
				have information content that is (and continues to be) an accurate reflection
				of what actually occurred at a particular time in the function, activity or
				transaction in question; and
(b) be
				able to be reconstructed electronically when required, so that each component
				is brought together as a whole and presented in an intelligible way;
				and
(c) possess a unique identifier
				or indexing that facilitates in the access of the information through the use
				of folder naming conventions or through searches or queries; and
(d) have been officially incorporated (either
				actively or passively) into an agency's or person's record-keeping
				system.
(3) Information
				shall be readable. Electronic records may exist independently of their physical
				format; however, by reducing records to their essential characteristics, we can
				allow for the existence of records, regardless of the current technology.
				Systems shall link the content of a record to its administrative or business
				context. In electronic environments, the essential characteristics rarely sit
				neatly together in a single, format-based package. Though all of the elements
				of an electronic record may exist within a single computer file, they may also
				be distributed across the entire state network. The integrity of these elements
				and the links between them are much more important than where they physically
				reside. If one is not able to place records in their appropriate administrative
				context, then they have seriously diminished value as evidence. In order for
				records to serve as evidence, three essential characteristics shall be
				maintained. Whenever one of the characteristics is altered, the ability of
				records to accurately reflect the activities of an agency is diminished. This
				means that records shall posses the following essential characteristics:
(a) content, that which conveys information
				(e.g. text, data, symbols, numerals, images, and sound);
(b) structure, appearance and arrangement of
				the content (e.g. relationships between fields, entities, language, style,
				fonts, page and paragraph breaks, links and other editorial devices);
(c) context, be able to be placed in context
				so that the circumstances of its creation and subsequent use by an agency or
				person can be understood in conjunction with its information content.
(4) Information shall retain its
				context. One of the major differences between electronic records and those on
				traditional media is that electronic records are not human-readable, thus their
				physical appearance alone does not provide sufficient information to determine
				their origin, purpose, uses or other aspects of the context in which they were
				created and maintained. Maintaining content, structure and context of
				electronic records is, therefore, both more vital and difficult than with
				traditional records. Meeting these conditions requires high quality records
				management and a sustained commitment, on the part of state agencies and the
				SRCA.