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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