Compiling warrant in support of the functional requirements for recordkeeping

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Jun/Jul 1997 by Duff, Wendy M

Of course, information technology standards are consensual while law is obligatory, which helps explain the difference in attitude. Also, there may be competing information technology standards. For example, the Standard General Markup Language and Open Document Architecture are both standards for structuring documents. Furthermore, standards have an invisible nature, and they often exist without people being aware of them or their importance. Computers are interoperable because of a suite of standards, but few people know which standards are accepted and which standards control various functions. If information technology standards lack the degree of authority required for warrant, the statements taken from these sources will probably not have a significant influence upon the acceptance of the functional requirements.

Statements of Warrant

Each authoritative source was scanned for relevant passages that illustrate the functional requirements, and these statements and their bibliographic citations were entered into a database. Each passage was classified according to the professional group to which the source related and the functional requirement that it supported. Three members of the Pittsburgh project team evaluated each passage for its relevance to, and its support for, a functional requirement. The warrant was also used to evaluate the wording and the comprehensiveness of the requirements. The wording of some requirements was refined to make them consistent with the warrant.

The sources turned up numerous supporting statements for some functional requirements, but warrant for other requirements was often very difficult to find. For example, statements that supported the requirements Accurate or Authorized were relatively easy to locate, but statements that supported or explained the less well understood concept of preserving the context of records reflected in the requirements Meaningful and Evidential were not. In fact, the only statements from legal sources that supported the requirement Evidential were drawn from the case of Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President (commonly known as the PROFS case). Furthermore, a recent federal regulation (21 CFR Part II. Electronic signatures; electronic records) on digital signature was heavily used to support some of the more technical requirements.

Sources from the different professions were helpful in supporting different aspects of the requirements. Auditing sources emphasized the need to carefully review and investigate the systems that control the records. Therefore, this literature provided many statements and detailed procedures for testing the reliability and consistency of the system which supported the requirements, Consistent and Implemented. Legal sources, however, had more general statements concerning the need to produce "evidence describing a process or system used to produce a result and showing that the process or system produces an accurate result." (Federal Rules of Evidence. Article IX Authentication or Identification Rule 901) Surprisingly, the federal regulations on electronic records management provided little warrant for the requirements (36 CFR, Part 1234 - Electronic Records Management).