Jennifer Jacobs
University Archivist, University of California-Irvine

ECURE annually provides an opportunity to address the preservation and access issues of electronic records at colleges and universities. According to its publicity, ECURE's goals include coordinating efforts among record creators, technology professionals, archivists, librarians, and records managers; supporting the efficient use of technology in university administration; and encouraging the development of practical approaches to preserving the historic record.

ECURE 2001 suffered some loss of participation due to the events of September. About 40 people attended. However, all but one of the sessions went forward as planned, and the event was well received. Rob Spindler, one of the co-chairs, reported that two-thirds of the attendees were information professionals, and one-third university administrators.

Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, gave the keynote address. He set the focus for the next two days: the subtle, cumulative ways that university records have been completely reinvented, and other "things administrators would really rather not hear about." Lynch stressed that although we can't know the parameters of the electronic record situation yet, we must move ahead because digital information cannot survive under "benign neglect." Media that will last for a thousand years is not the solution. Archivists must actively manage the bits and formats, which are much more intractable.

He then gave some examples of the changing political landscape of records and cultural artifacts. The Library of Congress, for instance, received $100 million from Congress to start a national digitization project, but $75 million is contingent on matching funds, services or equipment from other cultural institutions. Lynch wondered if the cultural record is in danger of becoming a service in more politically powerful, commercial hands, as indicated by the music industry's movement toward renting out music from a pool in their control. Finally, he discussed the murky space between students' course work and the web, especially as represented by courseware: Who owns it? Do students understand their rights? How long should it be kept? Does signing up for the course imply consent to be posted on the web? How much has plagiarism risen because of the web?

Lynch finished with the observation that collaboration will be key to smoothly managed electronic records. Archivists' perspective on authenticity may be the most important tool for archivists to bring to this quest for common understanding.

The sessions following the keynote address were conducted in conference rooms surrounding a foliaged indoor courtyard onto which 8 floors of hotel rooms opened. This small courtyard, safe from the stifling Arizona heat, was ideal for holding all of the participants close to the session rooms during breaks for networking. Regardless of the physical arrangement, the author was unable to attend concurrent sessions, so the brief notes below represent only a sample of the presentations given.

Donald Skupsky, JD, CRM, FAI, MIT spoke on "Legal Requirements for Electronic Records." Though the law varies from state to state, Skupsky offered the uniform laws, which many states use to fashion their own laws-one frequent exception is California. The uniform laws relevant to electronic records include: Uniform Rules of Evidence, Uniform Photographic Copies of Business and Public Records as Evidence Act, Uniform Preservation of Private Business Records Act, and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA).

According to Skupsky, intent is a key measure used by the courts to establish compliance with the law. One of the most important steps for a university to take is to develop procedures that include training and audit components, and to follow through on them. The establishment of such a system makes a business compliant with part of the Uniform Rules of Evidence. The thorough documentation of the system indicates its intention to be compliant, even if circumstances or misunderstanding result in an instance of non-compliance to another part of the Rules.

Skupsky has strong opinions about email. He recommends that email should be defined as "non-record" and should self-destruct after 30 days. But he acknowledged that archivists may not feel comfortable with such disregard for possible content in email. A specific procedure in place to convert an email into a "record" would ensure that only messages the author intended to be a record would be saved.

Sessions by Steven Warona of EDUCAUSE and Kathleen Kimball, Information Security Officer at Penn State, dealt with broader university computer use. Warona maintains that universities are moving too slowly in response to technological change. Attempts to police the sites students visit is beside the point: don't fall behind technology because, as a former president of Harvard claimed, "universities are ISPs that charge tuition." Kimball describes technology in the university setting quite differently. Rather than a marketing tool, she sees it as a highly volatile security hazard, even a potential terrorist weapon. Easy, distributed access, wide-ranging users and uses, and high-speed connectivity are conducive to the anonymous use of university resources. And anonymity is vital to someone interested in wreaking havoc through floods, worms, and denial of service attacks.

Wendy Duff, a professor at the University of Toronto, presented "Metadata: An Introduction." Data about data, she says, is many things to many people. To librarians, it is a bibliographic record, represented, for instance, by the elements in Dublin Core. To information technologists, it is the field properties and schema used to provide information about the architecture and rules of a particular database. To archivists, it is contextual information, and the front matter of a finding aid. The number of opinions is part of the cause for the variety in the several Metadata initiatives that Duff touched on next. A recent endeavor that builds on XML is EAC-Encoded Archival Context. EAC will describe the context of records in the manner that EAD describes the records themselves. Others she mentioned include the ISO-who will tackle metadata after their electronic records standard comes out-and the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System from the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems.

For more information, I recommend looking at Wendy Duff's PowerPoint presentation on the ECURE website at http://www.asu.edu/it/events/ecure/. Duff's slide "Metadata Facts to Remember" is particularly thought-provoking, but the website also includes almost all of the PowerPoint presentations given at these sessions and many that are not mentioned here. The conference materials give a good indication of the rigorous focus provided by the ECURE co-chairs, and admirably maintained by the speakers.