Electronic Records: Practices

Risk Management

The most difficult challenge archives face in midst of addressing electronic records is that of managing the risks inherent with the material. The pace of computer technology, both hardware and software, encourages short-lived format trends and dependence on specific environments and applications in order to create and subsequently access digital objects.

Thankfully, a counter trend has succeeded in promoting the use of information standards and their adoption by industry vendors, creating an economic value to the incorporation of technology-neutral standards in a vendor's computing products. The continued development of these industry-wide standards is essential to to the longevity and fiscal feasability of electronic record archives.

Three main factors must be monitored in order to assure accurate assessment of the risks faced by a given accessioned electronic record. Collectively, they form an obsolescence horizon which indicates the probable longevity of an electronic record in its present state. These factors are:

• Format obsolescence
• Medium obsolescence
• Technological obsolescence

Format obsolescence denotes the life of a particular format type. Factors which affect this aspect include dependence on a specific software application version or dependence on a single application running in a unique hardware/software configuration. For example, the typical word processing document generated by Microsoft Word 5.5 for PC is not consistently displayed by the current version of the software, Microsoft Word XP, five versions later. Similarly, Microsoft Access 97 files must undergo a transformation in order to be full accessed and editable by Microsoft Access XP. A more stark example is the commercial unavailability of the WordStar word processing application. So popular just 15-20 years ago, those files now require converters to be read; converters which are not developed and maintained by the primary software vendors today.

Medium obsolescence is slightly more straight forward. The physical media that electronic records are stored has a life span dictated by the nature of its construction, whether magnetic tape, optical disk, etc. Often this dovetails with the third aspect, technological obsolescence.

Technological obsolescence denotes the point at which the computing environment necessary to access the specific electronic record is no longer readily available. A simple example is the 5.25 inch floppy disk that was part of the early PC systems. Today, it is nearly impossible to buy a PC with a 5.25 floppy drive. Even 3.25" drives must typically be ordered in addition to the basic system. CDs and DVDs are reported to have a life of more than 50 years, if properly cared for. But can we expect that CD players and DVD players will be available 50 years from now?

All three of these aspects work in concert to establish the obsolescence horizon for a given electronic record series.

A rigorous monitoring of the computing industry as it affects an archive's current and planned electronic records holdings is essential to the proper management of preserved electronic records.