From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Electronic Records Raises Issues of Privacy and Access (C
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 10:57:55 -0500
Spread of Electronic Records Raises Issues of Privacy and Access
By FLORENCE OLSEN
University archivists and records managers were warned Thursday that their
jobs "are going to get very complicated" as more electronic records are
created in every nook and cranny of academe.
The archivists and records managers -- along with other campus-technology
experts -- are meeting here to discuss problems in managing the growing
volume of the digital records.
Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked
Information, told meeting participants that the increasing number of digital
documents would raise questions about privacy, authentication, and access
issues. The coalition's member organizations include the Association of
Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE. The conference is sponsored by Arizona
State University.
Student-information systems, on-line courses, Web-based catalogs, and
research papers that are published electronically, Mr. Lynch said, are all
examples of the "digital objects" whose preservation and future
accessibility institutions need to think about when they design new
information systems.
A big challenge for colleges and universities will be creating standards for
electronic "descriptors" that will make information now stored in data bases
intelligible for future generations of researchers and policy makers. Such
descriptors would tag various kinds of information in ways that would make
them far more usable.
Today, even the most sophisticated campus-wide systems do not provide a
sophisticated context for understanding the data the systems store, said Tim
McGovern, a senior project manager for information systems at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Everything that makes that data-base content intelligible is somewhere
else" -- usually in other information systems, Mr. McGovern said. The
situation, he said, is creating an archival problem that can be remedied
only if universities are willing to design future information systems to be
capable of holding both current and historical data.
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education