(Recordness continued)

INLS 525: Managing Electronic Records

Week 2 (1/22)

• 4 Characteristics of Records
• Yeo's definition
• PREMIS Data Model
• MA1: Lake v. City of Phoenix

• Court of Appeals, CV 07-0415, Opinion filed 13 Jan 2009
• State of Arizona Supreme Court, CV 09-0036 PR, Opinion filed 29 Oct 2009

Decision

• The record is the intellectual entity regardless of representation.
• Additional, although associated, information is not a part of that record.

Dissent

• The record is the document's original representation including "hidden" information.

State of Washington Supreme Court, 82397-9, Opinion filed 7 Oct 2010

Is e-mail metadata a public record that must be disclosed under the Public Records Act?

Yes

An electronic version of a record, including its embedded metadata, is a public record subject to disclosure.

Does a request to see an e-mail inherently include a request to see metadata?

No

Metadata must be explicitly requested in order to trigger an agency's obligation to provide it.

What are documents in a digital environment?

Fixity v. Fluidity

• "socially recognized types of communicative actions ... that are habitually enacted by members of a community to realize particular social purposes"*
• Defining features:
  • Purpose
  • Content
  • Form
• Why are genres important?

* Yates, JoAnne, and Wanda Orlikowski. "Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and Media." Academy of Management Review 17, no. 2 (1992): 299-326.

... are the "qualit[ies] of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action." (Wikipedia)

What sorts of affordances might a document or other digital object have?

• Habituated responses
• Embedded in specific sets of practices
• Fixity and fluidity are at play

• What characteristics to preserve?
• Aim for usability in "vernacular" use environment or authenticity through replication of old affordances?

... an application you have used recently.

• What are the main affordances?
• Which facilitate good recordkeeping?
• Which hinder good recordkeeping?

The ability to change information is an affordance we value for work.

There is an inverse relationship between mutability and trustworthiness.

Originally aired 2 Feb 1967

• A divided existence
• Chain of custody
• Authenticity
• Context

• Periodic snapshots
• Audit trails

• Web
  • Periodic snapshots - Internet Archive
  • Audit trails - Wikipedia
• Databases
  • Periodic backups
  • Transaction logging

• Potential for very detailed reconstruction (similar to value of system backups)
• Chain of custody begins as early as possible - before any changes are made
• If necessary, snapshots can be revisited to elicit more information that previous users have been able to elicit

• Captures very explicit representations of what has changed from one version to another whereas snapshots require inferences of changes between captures (can make guesses, but won't have explicit "diffs").

• Transient or Additive systems (e.g. U.S. Code v. U.S. Constitution)
• Raw size of files (is a full copy each time feasible or overly expensive)
• How often changes occur
• How easy changes are to detect - e.g. for GIS data, providers often don't advertize each change; with web content, you only know about the state of pages when visited, not things that happen in between
• How easy added/changed data are to get (e.g. if you just get a floppy, that's all you have)
• Underlying structure of content (e.g. changes to fields in a relational database vs. converting document from Word to PDF)
• How tightly coupled the different files are (e.g. if tightly coupled, might be desirable to create a complete snapshot of the directory, rather than doing versioning at file or file component level)
• What you're actually trying to document