Larry,

The original question was whether emails migrated from Groupwise to
Exchange inherently lost their authenticity based on the change in email
systems. We seem to be in agreement that emails that undergo such a
migration do not inherently lose their authenticity and their viability
as records. 

There is something lost in the translation, I am positive.

The point of the disaster recovery line is that even if the authenticity
were to be threatened by such a migration, the email created in
Groupwise will not immediately disappear. 

You rightly point out that I did not specify which backups would be
incremental and which would be full, and when a backup tape, monthly or
otherwise, would replace the preceding one of its type. I believe the
point still stands that email created in Groupwise will remain available
in Groupwise format for a time after the migration has occurred.

I agree that FRCP and e-discovery are a huge concern. I have interacted
with counsel who would love their clients to destroy any email backups
older than 30 days, incremental or otherwise. Anything kept longer than
necessary poses a potential liability, possibly a very costly one.
Record schedules document the established policies for an organization,
instructing its staff on what those retention periods must be and
demonstrating to external bodies the rationale for what has been
destroyed and its timing. 

Still, one must consider the federal requirements with which federal IT
groups must comply. The clearest way I can describe this is in the case
of a record with a zero day retention period. If that record is deleted
today, it remains accessible for a longer period of time via backups.
Regardless of how quickly counsel may wish to see email destroyed,
federal organizations are also bound to follow federal requirements for
disaster recovery plans and procedures. My point, these two sets of
requirements, FCRP and federal disaster recovery requirements may be in
tension.

The digital preservation thread was much more along the lines of
historical retention of authentic e-records, i.e. retaining historically
valuable email for 100+ years. I have seen numbers from other
organizations in the range of 2% to 5%. The point I was trying to get at
was not the size of the need, but that e-records must be capable of
outliving the systems in which they were created without loss of
authenticity. This suggests that email migrated from Groupwise into
another email system does not, by the fact of being migrated, lose its
authenticity.

Without question. any email moved into an ERMS would retain its
integrity and authenticity as long as the ERMS itself. Again, at the
point that the ERMS system itself becomes obsolete and any records
contained therein still needed to be retained, perhaps only as
historical records, authenticity still needs to be maintained as these
records are migrated into a different repository.

Documentation should be understood to be essential for any action
performed upon the records, as you point out, whether the record is
retained for a year or for fifty years.

 
Riccardo Ferrante
 
Information Technology Archivist & Electronic Records Program Director
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Smithsonian Institution Archives - 600 Maryland Ave SW, Suite 3000 - MRC
507 - Washington, DC 20013
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[Email] [log in to unmask] - [Phone] 202.633.5906 - [Fax] 202.633.5928
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Larry Medina
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 12:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Converting emails

Okay so I read this and the statement below gave me cold chills....

Also, a good IT group will have a disaster recovery process which will
> include daily backups over the past several months, plus monthly
backups
> which are likely retained for much longer. The end result - the
Groupwise
> files, at a minimum, will be available until those backups are
destroyed.


Is there something I'm missing here?  WHY would a "good IT group" or
anyone
else be maintaining backups for disaster recovery for "the past several
months, plus monthly backups which are likely retained for much longer"?
If they're for disaster recovery, each monthly backup should be replaced
when a new one is generated, unless these represent incremental backups.
Also, why is is likely these would be retained much longer?  Disaster
recovery backups are to be retained specifically for that purpose, once
the
information is no longer pertinent, the backups should be recycled or
destroyed.

The recent threads on changes to the FRCP and e-discovery should be
making
it extremely clear to organizations that the decision to maintain
information longer than necessary and especially having documented
practices
identifying that you do this as a routine "practice"are just begging for
trouble.

Second, from a digital preservation perspective - the data format will
> obsolesce over time. Because it is proprietary, the data format will
> probably obsolesce faster than the media or the technical environment.
This
> will force an organization to make an archival/record management
choice:
> does one preserve the bitstream until access is requested, possibly
decades
> down the road; does one preserve the whole technical environment along
with
> the original data format; or does one migrate from one data format to
> another so long as its authentic characteristics are maintained? The
answer
> will be driven in large part by the digital preservation strategy and
> principles your organization has.


A second choice here, from a records maangeemnt perspective, is to
identify
which e-mail records have extended retention requirements (typically,
it's a
VERY SMALL percentage that are required for "decades") and migrate those
to
some application neutral format, including all header information alnng
with
any attachments, etc. to meet retention requirements.   Depending on the
environment you work in, you may be required to do this anyway (as an
example, 36CFR requires all Federal Agencies and their Contractors to
move
any e-mail that is declared a record OUT OF the native e-mail
application
and into an ERMS for retention).  By making this choice, you may limit
the
volume of e-mail you need to convert/migrate.

Third, though I'm not qualified to respond from this perspective,
software
> system replacement is a fact of life for large organizations today.
The
> courts don't seem to consider email that's been migrated from one
system to
> the next as corrupted or no longer authentic. Those migrated emails
are
> still viewed to be discoverable and authentic. Now if the migration
modified
> the content of those records or failed to migrate all of the records,
> whether by accident or deliberately, that would be a different story.
>

Which is why you must document any changes that could potentially alter
information, especially the metadata, when they occur.  This may not
serve
as a "justification" to the courts, but it will satisfy the need to
provide
evidence as to what happened and that it occurred in the normal course
of
business.

Larry

-- 
Larry Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972

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------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------
>>Also, a good IT group will have a disaster recovery process which will
include daily backups over the past several months, plus monthly backups
which are likely retained for much longer.<<

IT may think it is a good practice, RM's should make sure it is not
done.  Retaining backup tapes of any kind long term is like storing
powder, fuse and matches for your opponents.

Bill R

Bill Roach,  CRM
Manager, Corporate Records
MoneyGram International
1550 Utica Ave. So.
Minneapolis, MN 55416
Direct: 952-591-3325
Fax: 952-591-3333

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