A trustworthy record is one that is both an accurate statement of facts and a
genuine manifestation of those facts. Record trustworthiness thus has two qualitative
dimensions: reliability and authenticity. Reliability means that the record is capable
of standing for the facts to which it attests, while authenticity means that the record
is what it claims to be.
The trustworthiness of records as evidence is of particular interest to legal
and historical practitioners who need to ensure that records are trustworthy so that
justice may be realized or the past understood. Traditionally, the disciplines of law
and history have relied on the guarantee of trustworthiness inherent in the
circumstances surrounding the creation and maintenance of records. For records
created by bureaucracies, that trustworthiness has been ensured and protected
through the mechanisms of authority and delegation, and through procedural
controls exercised over record-writers and record-keepers.
As bureaucracies rely increasingly on new information and communication
technologies to create and maintain their records, the question that presents itself is
whether these traditional mechanisms and controls are adequate to the task of
verifying the degree of reliability and authenticity of electronic records, whose most
salient feature is the ease with which they can be invisibly altered and manipulated.
This study explores the evolution of means of assessing the trustworthiness
of records as evidence from antiquity to the digital age, and from the perspectives of
law and history; and examines recent efforts undertaken by researchers in the field
of archival science to develop methods for ensuring the trustworthiness of electronic
records specifically, based on a contemporary adaptation of diplomatics. Diplomatics
emerged in the seventeenth century as a body of concepts and principles for
determining the authenticity of medieval documents.
The exploration reveals the extent to which legal, historical, and diplomatic
methods operate within a framework of inferences, generalizations and probabilities;
the degree to which those methods are rooted in observational principles; and the
continuing validity of a best evidence principle for assessing record trustworthiness.
The study concludes that, while the technological means of assessing and ensuring
record trustworthiness have changed fundamentally over time, the underlying
principles have remained remarkably consistent.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10157 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | MacNeil, Heather Marie |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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