Trusting Records Legal, Historical and Diplomatic Perspectives

A trustworthy record is one that is both an accurate statement of facts and a genuine manifestation of those facts. Record trustworthiness thus has two qualitative dimensions: reliability and authenticity. Reliability means that the record is capable of standing for the facts to which it attests, while authenticity means that the record is what it claims to be. This study explores the evolution of the principles and methods for determining record trustworthiness from antiquity to the digital age, and from the perspectives of law and history. It also examines recent efforts undertaken by researchers in the field of archival science to develop methods for ensuring the trustworthiness of records created and maintained in electronic systems.
Audience: The target audience for this study is legal scholars working in the field of evidence law, historians working in the field of historical methodology, and recordkeeping professionals (records managers, information technology specialists, archivists) working on the design and implementation of contemporary organizational recordkeeping systems.

1 The Evolution of Legal and Historical Methods for Assessing the Trustworthiness of Records.- 1.1 The Roman Era.- 1.2 The Middle Ages.- 1.3 The Renaissance.- 1.4 The Seventeenth Century.- 1.5 Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Developments in Evidence Law.- 1.6 Nineteenth-Century Developments in Historical Method.- 1.7 Conclusion.- 2 Trusting Records as Legal Evidence: Common Law Rules of Evidence.- 2.1 Common law vs. Civil law Procedure.- 2.2 Rules Governing the Admissibility of Documentary Evidence.- 2.3 Admissibility of Electronic Records.- 2.4 The Role of the Adversarial Process in the Legal Assessment of Record Trustworthiness.- 2.5 Conclusion.- 3 Trusting Records as Historical Evidence: Modern Historical Methods.- 3.1 Framework of Modernist Historical Methods.- 3.2 The External and Internal Criticism of a Record.- 3.3 Postmodernist Critiques of Historical Method.- 3.4 Challenges to Historical Method posed by Electronic Records.- 3.5 Conclusion.- 4 Creating and Maintaining Trustworthy Records in Electronic Systems: Archival Diplomatic Methods.- 4.1 Modern Diplomatics.- 4.2 The Application of Diplomatics to the Records of Twentieth-Century Bureaucracies.- 4.3 Contemporary Archival Diplomatics: The University of British Columbia Project.- 4.4 Limits to Ensuring Record Trustworthiness in a Bureaucracy.- 4.5 Conclusion.- Conclusion.- Notes.