Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-167)
NATALIE CEENEY,
DR DAVID
THOMAS AND
SUSAN HEALY
28 MARCH 2006
Q160 Chairman: The Information Commissioner
has told us that his office has met with difficulties when there
are disputes about whether or not the authority holds the information
that someone is asking for. Is that an area where you can give
more advice, and who really could be involved in challenging the
response: "Oh, we do not have that kind of information"?
Natalie Ceeney: Can I ask my colleague
Susan to answer that one?
Susan Healy: We have issued guidance
on the disposal of records and the importance of documenting the
disposal of records, and we have talked to the Information Commissioner
about this as a particular issue with a view to our coming up
with more guidance which would perhaps get to the bodies which
do not necessarily have qualified record managers on the staff
because, perhaps, they are smaller. We are about to issue a new
series of guidance, which is aimed at smaller organisations and
which will be expressed in user-friendly fashion, explaining what
it is about geared to the records management code, and we are
hoping, in this way, we can bring home to the smaller organisations
the fundamental things that they can do, without necessarily being
too expensive, which will help them get over this problem. One
of the things which we do is encourage them to know what records
they have, know what they keep, for how long they keep it and
what gets destroyed when, and we hope that will get around this
problem which the Commissioner encounters in organisations saying,
"We do not have this information", and we do not know
why they do not have it and we do not know when they stopped having
it.
Q161 Chairman: Do you think you should
be sent in, like the Flying Squad, to have a look where the authority
cannot produce a documented record or has destroyed the document?
Natalie Ceeney: That is an area
we have discussed with the Information Commissioner about using
our expertise to help. We have tended to take the approach more
of a consultative rather than an enforcement body, because I think
what authorities tend to need is help and guidance rather than
necessarily a sort of hit squad. We do that informally already
with a lot of bodies and we have talked with the Information Commissioner
about playing a more strategic role in helping bodies as required.
Q162 Chairman: That may help for
the future, but it does not help them to resolve a difficult case
where there is no certainty or proof that that document or class
of document is not still being held?
Susan Healy: What you are looking
at is balance of probability. Is it plausible, is it credible
when the organisation says that it knows it had these records
once but they do not exist any more? What the Commissioner can
do, and is already doing, is to look to see what is the pattern
of records management for the organisation? Have they got processes
in place which make a credible claim that this information was
destroyed at an agreed date? You have to look at the question
of whether or not there were records destroyed in an orderly fashion
as part of a whole package of records management organisation.
Q163 Chairman: There has been a huge
change. Vast amounts of data which used to be on paper are now
held in electronic form. We are moving into a period where only
relatively recent events can be traced by electronic records,
and you have expressed concern that a lot of information that
is not provided might simply disappear completely over a relatively
short timescale, the next six or seven years, simply because the
mechanism by which it is held is not as robust as traditional
paper. Where do we go on this one?
Natalie Ceeney: Maybe I should
say a little bit about the issue and what we need to do to tackle
it. The big challenge is that managing electronic just is not
the same as managing paper. What everybody is used to in paper
record management terms is you first create a record, then you
create a paper file, you put it on a shelf and it can usually
last for a couple of hundred years if you do not do anything particularly
dire to it. In an electronic format the chances of us opening
a document that is more than five to seven years old and reading
it and the format being intelligible, let alone your computer
being able to read the floppy disc, is quite low unless you take
active steps to preserve it. That is a pretty new concept. The
other thing that is new in this field is the technology itself.
There are no off-the-shelf digital preservation solutions out
there to buy at the moment. We are not only talking about new
practice, we are talking about completely new technology. What
are we doing about that? Essentially consortiums of libraries
and archives across the world, of which we are a key player, are
working on the principles for digital preservation. We are ourselves
at National Archives spending seven million pounds over the next
couple of years to build a digital preservation system, because
we have to take the lead, and we work with other archives and
libraries to make sure the standards are right. What we are also
trying to do is to generate interest amongst suppliers so that
off-the-shelf solutions do become available. What we are also
doing is sharing that information across government to make sure
that the awareness of, first of all, the issue of digital preservation
and, secondly, our experience of the technology gets shared so
that we do not hit the crisis point that we are describing. The
short answer is, if we do nothing, we are going to have a crisis,
but the National Archives is working pretty hard to make sure
that we do not do that.
Q164 Chairman: At the moment there
is no answer out there. It is not that departments are failing
to do what you think they should do. They are waiting to be told
what to do?
Natalie Ceeney: That is absolutely
right.
Q165 Dr Whitehead: Does this mean
that when it is being universally advocated that electronic records
keeping is a good thing for authorities in general and, indeed,
we have heard in earlier evidence that this might, for example,
be making more information available quicker and at less cost
than a search through the paper files, the down side of that is
that there could be very substantial costs down the line for,
presumably, transferring all the records, as is the mechanism
at the moment, to whatever the latest form of digital retrieval
is when the time comes and that, therefore, the overall cost might
not be that much different in the end than keeping the stuff in
a box in a file?
Natalie Ceeney: There are a number
of points there. The first thing to say is that under any records
management system what is important (and I think this was illustrated
by the police team earlier talking about disposal schedules) is
that not everything is kept forever. Typically, for example, the
National Archives take about 5% of government files, so at every
stage you would expect weeding down of volumes, so what would
transfer to a preservation system would not be everything; it
would be a small volume. The second thing is the costs are going
to be much more effective if we share technology. We simply do
not know at this point what a preservation system across government
would cost. It is inevitable that the cost will be far lower in
future than it is going to cost now for us to build something,
given the embryonic state of the technology. Regarding the economics
long-term, essentially we are contrasting paper warehouses with
staff and a large space, sometimes in Central London, with a big
box of software, which we simply do not know the cost of. At today's
cost, probably digital preservation is more expensive. In 10 years
it could be the reverse. It could be that a big box less than
the size of this room could hold information that previously massive
warehouses across London would have held, and a lot cheaper. We
simply do not know. What we do know is that we have got so much
electronic information we simply have no choice than to build
a digital preservation mechanism to store it at the end.
Q166 Dr Whitehead: I was thinking
in terms of the point that the witness made to us earlier today
about the fact that a request could be refused or regarded as
difficult to meet on costs grounds, because of an estimate of
the paper trail research that would be required, when in fact
information stored electronically could be retrieved at the press
of a button. The suggestion here appears to be that actually it
is not quite as cheap and straightforward as all that and that
perhaps, if one took into account the down-the-line costs of the
different forms of record keeping, maybe that calculation would
not come out quite as positive as might be suggested?
Natalie Ceeney: I think that is
a fair assessment. The economics of electronic verses paper are
also very different costs at very different stages. People have
talked about electronic records management as being cheaper. It
is at the point of retrieval, but electronic records management
processing systems cost money in a way that maybe creating files
in a paper office does not. It is a different way of charging
the costs. However, I would say electronic records management
with digital preservation backing it up does make access to information
far faster and far more reliable in terms of being able to know
what you have got and how to find it and get it quickly.
Q167 Chairman: Can I ask you about
one other thing which the Committee and individual members get
representations about, and that is the issue of releasing census
information. Of course there is a policy decision, which I do
not particularly want to go into, about what view the Government
takes about the conditions that are supposed to apply to censuses
and what the effect on confidentiality would be. It is not about
that I wanted to ask you, it is the practical implications for
National Archive if, for example, the Government were to decide
this year that the 1911 census ought to be released before the
100-year date or, indeed, that any other census should be accelerated.
What can you tell us about that?
Natalie Ceeney: The issue with
the 1911 census is that it is a pretty huge document and it is
not yet digitised or microfilmed. Our approach for census information
has been, given its huge potential popularity to anyone doing
family history research or local history research, to digitise
it. We have plans in place to digitise it in the same way we did
with the 1901 census. To give an example of why we think this
is so important, looking back at the 1901 census, the ratio of
people using it on-line verses on site is one hundred to one,
and so we know that if we can digitise the census it is going
to be immensely popular. The problem is that digitisation takes
time and costs money. Our approach is to find commercial suppliers,
as we did with the 1901 Census, who would take the commercial
risk of digitisation, which is going to be hugely expensive, in
return for essentially being able to release it to a wide audience,
and it is also going to take a process of three to four years.
If policy were to change or the Information Commissioner were
to deem it open under FOI, the practicality is that it is very
unlikely we would find a commercial supplier willing to take the
1911 Census and to digitise it while at the same time answering
FOI requests, but also it would mean access to the few rather
than the many, because we would have to stop digitisation in order
to let anyone who wanted to walk on site see it, which would stop
us doing the digitisation. The other thing to stress is that it
is a paper document, and therefore, by its nature (almost 100
years old) is pretty fragile. It is fine for digitising. When
people are going to leaf through it every day, actually it will
quite quickly deteriorate. Our view is the best way of getting
people access to is to allow us the time to digitise it and make
it readily available to everybody.
Chairman: Thank you very much. We are
glad to have that view on the record. We are grateful to you for
your help this afternoon. That concludes our formal session.
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