The Swedish Government has established the eGovernment Delegation agency to identify and support excellence in e-government implementation strategies. This agency has commenced working with the National Archives, to ensure that archival requirements are addressed when developing new e-services. However, the prevailing view of archives is a traditional curatorial approach, which focuses on capturing the end product once actions have been completed. In the digital environment, the prevailing archival practice frameworks are not adequate to the task of capturing the full digital context and process that is essential for a complete record. Previously, when paper records were aggregated on a physical file, the full record of processes was more likely to be captured and managed for the long term.
Results from two empirical case studies will be used to present and illustrate the risks and problems generated by an approach where the records are not identified and captured until late in the business process. In this paper the term post hoc approach to records capture is used to describe the method whereby an attempt is made to capture records, including the necessary metadata, after they are created, without prior planning or system design. One of the Swedish eGovernment Delegation’s aims is to motivate public agencies to reach level four on Layne and Lee’s e-government maturity model, that is, full integration of interaction between agencies and citizens. However, the model does not incorporate any recordkeeping requirements in its maturity benchmarks. It is clear these kinds of e-services are so complex that late intervention by archivists will not be adequate for needed recordkeeping support and long-term preservation. So it is essential that guidance on archival preservation of integrated e-services is made available as soon as possible, particularly as current trends in government indicate that e-services will be outsourced to private providers.
Strategies are proposed for including recordkeeping re- quirements in e-service models. Advantageously, this can be done using existing benchmarking tools such as GARP, ISO 15489, ISO 30301 and the ICA Principles and Functional Requirements for Records In Electronic Office Environments.
2010. p. 71-82