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Yes, this is a key issue for us all I'd say. Apart from the big documents - Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, pictures by Monet etc - there are even bigger issues. For me in the small but independent charity of which I am the archivist in Britain, the big dual questions are 1) what will they say/know about us in 200, 500, 800 years? and 2) what's the evidence for it - or more basically - PROVE it! There is nothing like the original, signed, handled document for that. And that's the mantra I have on this one. The other, allied to this that I've been pressed on, and, please help me out on this, is this scenario: In the interest of enabling access, why (the argument put to me went) can’t we just upload all digitally created stuff to Google Drive (or similar) in its raw form – so, unedited etc. – and let search engines do all the indexing and finding, and hence no need to purge/ remove duplicate entries/drafts etc. Data storage is cheap enough and it’s what tools like Google Drive are made for... OK, there’s a recognition that some material is confidential and you wouldn’t just give it free access, but what about all the rest? Why not just shove it all into such a cloud-type medium (the security issue is improving fast, and some cloud sources are very much better than they were) and use computers to do what they were built for? After all, it’s how online banking works, and that’s secure enough. Instinctively this goes against the grain, because of the concerns about cloud-type services. They’re not reckoned to be universally secure; that one doesn’t/couldn’t know at anyone moment where your data was held; even strictly speaking who owned it; and what about computer crashes? These are I know well rehearsed arguments about cloud services and I have heard them expressed. But I know that not all computer specialists agree, and it’s true that these services are getting much more secure now. As I say, this looks like something that managers might well use as arguments for storage and access and also as arguments for NOT creating formal structures for organisations’ records and archives – because of the apparent ability of search engines to sort the wheat from the chaff and indeed to find the individual knobs of corn themselves. So my question is really one about what have I missed in responding to this? In managing our archives I am interested in being able in time to provide greater access to the archives, depending on different and defined levels of security and confidentiality, and in line with recognised archives practice. So what IS "recognised archives practice", how is it developing and what should we be trying to anticipate in what we do. Thank you colleagues for your thoughts... Solihin Garrard Contact the list owner for assistance at [log in to unmask] For information about joining, leaving and suspending mail (eg during a holiday) see the list website at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=archives-nra