John O'Donoghue (Kerry South, Fianna Fail)

I propose to take Questions Nos. 9 and 32 together.

The records of all public bodies are increasingly being created and maintained electronically. The long-term preservation of departmental records in electronic form is the responsibility of the National Archives. However, in the short term each Department, office or court is responsible for the preservation of its own electronic records, that is, until such time as they are obliged to lodge them with the National Archives in accordance with the relevant legislation. All other public bodies are responsible for both the short-term and the long-term preservation of their own electronic records.

The National Archives has in the past undertaken surveys by questionnaire to assess the extent of record-generating computer systems across the Civil Service and the types of records being generated by such systems. It is evident there are large quantities of such records. More recently, pilot surveys have been undertaken focusing on specific specialised systems. Systems surveyed have included those of the Revenue Commissioners and the Land Registry. The National Archives has also undertaken a number of pilot projects to establish how certain types of electronic records might be preserved over time.

I am responsible for the State papers transferred to the National Archives. The work of the body is set out in the National Archives Act 1986. The Act requires the National Archives to acquire, preserve, restore and display departmental records and to make these available to the public. Section 14 of the Act empowers the Minister to approve a place, other than the National Archives itself, to receive deposits of specified departmental records and for this to constitute a transfer to the National Archives. I do not propose to remove all archival material held throughout the country by different bodies into the care of the National Archives.

The body is considering how best to meet its responsibility to effect the permanent preservation of digital archives. In many cases, long-term preservation may best be effected by transfer to the National Archives. In other cases, particularly where specialised, purpose designed systems are concerned, it may be wiser, safer and more economically sensible to preserve digital records within the agencies in which they were created. Should that option be pursued, the National Archives would have to be satisfied that it would enable it to meet its responsibilities regarding the preservation and access by systematic monitoring, inspection and reporting. Typically, the National Archives website would become a hub through which such records would be made available for public inspection.

The problems involved in storing electronic records are different from those connected with the storage of paper files. Large electronic record keeping systems require only a small fraction of the space required to hold the paper records. Electronic record keeping requires ongoing expenditure on hardware, software and human expertise on a scale that has no parallel in the world of paper records. Stored in the right conditions, paper is inherently durable whereas there is no proven long-term storage medium for the preservation of records in digital form. To guard against loss of records due to the physical deterioration of the media on which they are stored, regular and continuing migration of such records to new storage media is required. Records created in proprietary software systems will have to be carried forward through later versions of these proprietary formats or, if practicable, exported to non-proprietary formats for permanent preservation. Maintaining functionality of systems over time in these circumstances will be difficult to guarantee and potentially costly to implement. Migration of records to new systems and formats will have to be undertaken in ways that will ensure their authenticity, reliability and evidential value over time.

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