Previous page: The archivist's perspective
This has left IT struggling with many inappropriate areas, such as user compliance. Johnson tackled this issue at the UCSD, which includes six colleges, two hospitals and several research centres in supercomputing, oceanography and other areas.
"We enacted a policy in 2003 that made e-mail recipients the owners and custodians of the record, and provided guidelines that helped people understand what was business e-mail or incidental use," she says. "So the IT group looks after the e-mail system's efficiency without having to deal with retention issues."
Johnson says she often speaks at technology conferences to educate IT folks about areas where they may be misguided. For example, many are surprised when she tells them incremental back-up tapes don't serve as a credible archive from a business continuity perspective. The amount of data on networks is getting so huge that doing a full back-up of all the data and software becomes difficult, she explains.
Instead, many resort to storing only what's different over a period of time, typically a day. "But if you have 2,000 back-up tapes with incremental pieces and you need to restore your system, you have to feed them all in, and this is very difficult. Everyone goes into this mode: So what do we really need on our system; can we pick and choose?" Incremental back-ups have become popular but are not ultimately fully recoverable, since systems typically need to be reconfigured after a systems failure, she says.
Archivists are deeply concerned about these types of misconception, which have played a role in the obsolete storage media issue now coming to the fore, she says. Optical disks, for example, were used in the past. But once stored and put away, these are typically left out of later storage upgrades and migrations to more current storage media.
"We've created an environment where we think we can go back and pull the information so long as we keep the disks, but this becomes more difficult and expensive over time," she says, echoing Wiseman's comment about eventually losing the technology to read it. "We've lost so much of our recent history in government sectors. The pyramids lasted thousands of years, but we've already lost the knowledge to recreate the technology of NASA's Apollo moon missions."
A similar point about lost information was made by John Reid when he left the helm of the Information Commissioner's office in 2005: "The 20-year period from 1978 to 1998 significantly threatened the public record and destroyed the audit trail." And Robert Marleau, appointed as Information Commissioner in 2007, has noted that revisions to access laws may be in order, given that technology and the way government manages information has changed in the last quarter-century.
Access, security and privacy
One area that has really taken off in recent years is the public's request for information, says Johnson. Legislation such as Public Records Acts and Freedom of Information Acts was enacted in recent years to allow public access to information collected by government. "Every U.S. state and most Canadian provinces have opened the public records required by law," she says.
But legislation requiring the security of data and privacy of individuals has also been enacted. Without a comprehensive IT architecture that addresses all aspects of information lifecycle management (ILM), it is becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy and balance all requirements, she says. "At first, the idea was to make data exposable and access available; then we needed to compartmentalize it to make it secure; and now we're saying we need to make decisions based on privacy."
Johnson believes legitimate access to information is sometimes trumped by security and privacy considerations. For example, the UCSD's campus council had a problem with scanning paper records that might have social security numbers into their system, even though the move would improve business operations and make records more accessible.
"I would be more concerned about securing access to the network once they'd scanned them, than that they'd scanned documents with personal information," she says. "Many people are taking this a shade too far."
The authorities need to reconcile this, as different areas of government have competing priorities, she says.
"In legislation, there's the objective to secure information, but this also rides hand-in-hand with our sunshine laws and improving exposure to the public. Often the two don't gel, and it affects how we develop guidelines. We don't have one overarching policy that encompasses access, security and privacy. Nobody's looking at all of it as one piece of data."
These issues affect IT operations, as masses of data requiring decisions about storage, security and other aspects are piling up, says Jensen. "Providing security for information that is not defined is difficult," he says. "We're spending money and effort securing data that may not necessarily need to be secured.
"If the data isn't differentiated, then we have to secure everything equally, instead of putting higher security on information that really needs it. If we had a complete philosophy around ILM, security would be exactly where it should be, and we would know what the information is, how long to keep it and who needs access to it."
Rosie Lombardi is a Toronto-based freelance writer. She can be reached at rosie@rosie-lombardi.com
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