PD 0008: a lawyer's view of the legal admissibility of document images

Abstract

The publication of the British Standards Institute (BSI) Code of Practice for Legal Admissibility of Information Stored on Electronic Document Management Systems — PD 0008 has focused attention on how the courts may react when confronted with documents generated from document imaging systems. To judge by the large attendance at the recent series of conferences to discuss the Code of Practice, this is an area of increasing interest.

From Sumeria to Sunny Hill: are we still cooking the books?

“…What, then, is an honest organisation, like Sunny Hill, whose survey respondents unanimously declared that complete, accurate and authentic records are the only ones worth having despite G. Smith's declaration that``a record does not have to be perfect to be useful'' (Smith, 1996), to do in the face of the``local particularity of truth''? (Benko, n.d.).…”

“…Now, it is clear that reliability and authenticity in records management terms have different nuances of meaning. Eun Park (2002) has shown in his fascinating study Understanding``Authenticity'' in Records Management: A Survey for Practitioners and Users, that these terms are used by academic and theoretical projects such as the University of Pittsburgh Project on Functional Requirements for Evidence in Record-keeping (University of Pittsburgh, 1993-1996 and the University of British Columbia (UBC) Preservation of The Integrity of Electronic Record and the InterPARES Project (b, n.d.), with only limited application to real-life situations so that he wished to examine:…”

“…. [T]he document image archive may come to be seen as the first choice source of reliable documentation (Smith, 1996).…”