Management, appraisal and preservation of electronic records: Vol 1 ...

Management, appraisal and preservation of electronic records
The need for structure
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for current operational needs, but does not provide an adequate mechanism to
support the use of records as a longer term corporate resource.
3.5 Electronic records serve purposes which are more than simply current
information; and the record requires contextual information as well as content
to be complete. A structured index is necessary to link records in the same
sequence together - those which deal with the same individual or case, which
address the same topic under various aspects, or which are one element within
the development of a narrative. A pre-coordinated structure is necessary to
allow decisions about filing and classification, most likely made by the end user
at the time of creating the record, to be consistent and predictable.
3.6 The structure which is used need not necessarily be a hierarchical
arrangement as is often used for paper records; another means, for example a
thesaurus of concepts or functional terms, may be more appropriate. A
consistent indexing structure allows for consistency in information access and
retrieval: for example, by removing the need to anticipate and search on all
keywords which may have been used by the record creators; and by minimising
the occurrence of ‘false drops’ through inappropriate use of an ambiguous
keyword which retrieves irrelevant records.
3.7 The need for flexibility, in any case, is based on an assumption that there is
an implicit structure within the content of records, and that this can cleverly be
made use of by retrieval software. The success of this approach, however, is
highly dependent on the search criteria adopted by the user at the time of
retrieval, and may require several iterations to produce an acceptable result.
The pre-coordinated classification approach requires more effort at the time of
record creation and storage, but less at the time of retrieval. The balance
between the two approaches in any particular record-keeping system
determines the balance of effort required from the desktop user at the time of
creation/storage and at the time of retrieval.
3.8 Most users are accustomed to working with individual documents in
contextual or thematic assemblies where the relationship of one document to
another is clearly apparent. The paper convention is the registered file where
documents are linked by string (the Treasury tag) and enclosed in a file cover
which also displays some metadata to ease identification and access. Users need
to be able to create and preserve an electronic equivalent of the Treasury tag
which preserves the dependencies between documents and allows users of the
data to examine the information in its full context.