Marc,
A slight aside to your information. The TNA in their infinite wisdom are no
longer accepting product for testing after the end of March and there is no
effective alternative. The net effect of this decision could well be to stop
further development of ERM/EDRM product for some time to come as it is no
longer worth suppliers going to the considerable expense of developing new
product which cannot be benchmarked. Eventually, as current product no
longer becomes viable because of technology obsolescence, the situation may
well change but, personally, I find this a very short-sighted policy.
David Aspinall
____________________________________________
-----Original Message-----
From: The UK Records Management mailing list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Fresko, Marc
Sent: 24 March 2005 11:48
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Deletion of Records
Caroline
In case you still are concerned at this issue, we "missed a trick" in
earlier discussions.
I had forgotten that the TNA ERMS specification mandates, under
requirement A.4.67, that
"Where records are stored on re-writeable media, the EDRMS must enable
the complete obliteration of records, parts, folders, and groups of
folders that have been so scheduled and confirmed, so that they cannot
be restored by operating system features or by specialist data recovery
facilities".
There are a couple of footnotes to clarify points, but that is an
important requirement.
This has a simple implication: any product approved by TNA (see list at
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/electronicrecords/reqs2002/approved.h
tm) MUST delete records properly, not leaving them around to be
un-deleted. If you have found that an approved product does not comply,
then I imagine TNA would be very pleased to hear from you. If on the
other hand you are looking at a product which is not TNA-approved, and
if you are seeking to use it for electronic records management, then I
suspect this will be among the least of your problems; there will be
other functional weaknesses detracting from its ability to manage
electronic records well.
Marc Fresko
-----Original Message-----
From: Fresko, Marc
Sent: 18 March 2005 13:23
To: Caroline Dominey; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Deletion of Records
A couple of points in response:
1. There is often a degree of ambiguity in demonstrations in the usage
of the words "document" and "record". An EDRMS treats these two kinds
of object differently. I mention this as you refer to both in your
question...
2. If the software is approved by TNA, it must explicitly prevent
deletion of records except as part of a strictly audited process.
3. If a properly deleted record can be recovered (without resort to a
backup) I doubt that would be considered acceptable, but I also doubt
that normal testing would detect this (it is not the sort of thing you
normally would test for).
4. In days when WORM (Write-Once Read-Many) optical discs were in more
widespread use (i.e. discs which specifically preclude the deletion of
any data), people began to realise they would have this issue. The
(then) Data Protection Commissioner issued guidance to the effect that
it would be acceptable to delete only the index information for a
document, even though the document itself remained undeleted, because it
would be so difficult to recover (a long time ago this, but I think it
may have been Guidance Note 4). I imagine this principle should still
apply; which raises the question of how easy or difficult it would be to
recover an undeleted "deleted" object.
Marc Fresko
-----Original Message-----
From: The UK Records Management mailing list
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Caroline
Dominey
Sent: 18 March 2005 11:46
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Deletion of Records
I recently attended a demonstration of an Electronic Document Management
System and was surprised to find out that there was no way of deleting
documents from the system. You could 'delete' the record so that it was
no longer accessible via the standard front end however the records was
still there are could be restored if necessary.
Is this standard practice? It seems to me that we would need to delete
records in order to comply with Data Protection legislation?
I would be interested to hear whether others are using similar systems
or whether there are systems that allow 'full deletion.'
Thanks
Caroline
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