Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records
n.a research endeavor based at the University of British Columbia from 1994 to 1997 designed to identify and define the requirements for creating and maintaining reliable and authentic digital resourcesGilliland-Swetland 2000a, 15The principles underlying the life cycle have been refined through projects such as Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records, conducted from 1994 to 1996 by archival researchers at the University of British Columbia (known as the UBC Project).Gilliland-Swetland and Eppard 2000Professor Luciana Duranti of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia is the director of the international research team participating in InterPARES. The research builds on an earlier project at UBC, “The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records,” which addressed issues surrounding the creation and maintenance of authentic and reliable electronic records in their active, pre-archival state.Hirtle 2000, 18Two projects at the University of British Columbia (UBC) are investigating the integrity of digital information over time. The first project, “Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records,” sought to identify the best methods for preserving the reliability and authenticity of electronic records over time. The UBC analysis determined that generic information systems designed to collect, process, store, and disseminate information lack some of the functionality needed to produce, maintain, and preserve reliable electronic records.Park 2001, 272Based on these definitions of authenticity and reliability, the University of British Columbia (UBC) Project on Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records conceptually identified and defined the requirements for ensuring the integrity of reliable and authentic electronic records, developing these requirements into templates to examine the intrinsic and extrinsic features of the record in electronic environments.Gilliland-Swetland 2002, 200The research also built upon the outcomes of a research project carried out between 1994 and 1997 at the University of British Columbia entitled The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records (“the UBC Project”) which resulted in a set of standards and rules for developing and implementing a trustworthy electronic recordkeeping system.Hackett 2003, 100–101InterPARES 2 is actually the third project in a series of archival investigations of digital materials. The first two projects were the Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records (1994 to 1997) and the InterPARES project (1999 to 2001). All three projects are firmly rooted in the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC).Forstrom 2009, 463The framework for assessing and maintaining the authenticity of electronic records has been the focus of a series of InterPARES and InterPARES-related projects dating back to 1994. The first project, known as the Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records (also UBC Project) ran from 1994 to 1997; InterPARES 1 ran from 1999 to 2001; InterPARES 2 ran from 2002 to 2006; and InterPARES 3 started in 2007 and ends in 2012.Sengsavang 2019Efforts such as the UBC Project (Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records, 1994-1997), the report of the Research Library Group’s Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, Preserving Digital Information (1996), and OAIS (first published in 2002) were at the forefront of a sea-change that is still happening, and also symptomatic of a growing collective awareness of at-risk digital media.
Notes
The United States Department of Defense collaborated on portions of this effort, and colloquial names for the venture included the UBC Project, the UBC-MAS Project, and the UBC-DoD Project. This project also was influential in the development of the InterPARES project. Information on additional activities is available via the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.interpares.org/UBCProject/intro.htm.
