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UBC Theses and Dissertations
Trusting records: the evolution of legal, historical, and diplomatic methods of assessing the trustworthiness of records from antiquity to the digital age MacNeil, Heather Marie
Abstract
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. The trustworthiness of records as evidence is of particular interest to legal and historical practitioners who need to ensure that records are trustworthy so that justice may be realized or the past understood. Traditionally, the disciplines of law and history have relied on the guarantee of trustworthiness inherent in the circumstances surrounding the creation and maintenance of records. For records created by bureaucracies, that trustworthiness has been ensured and protected through the mechanisms of authority and delegation, and through procedural controls exercised over record-writers and record-keepers. As bureaucracies rely increasingly on new information and communication technologies to create and maintain their records, the question that presents itself is whether these traditional mechanisms and controls are adequate to the task of verifying the degree of reliability and authenticity of electronic records, whose most salient feature is the ease with which they can be invisibly altered and manipulated. This study explores the evolution of means of assessing the trustworthiness of records as evidence from antiquity to the digital age, and from the perspectives of law and history; and examines recent efforts undertaken by researchers in the field of archival science to develop methods for ensuring the trustworthiness of electronic records specifically, based on a contemporary adaptation of diplomatics. Diplomatics emerged in the seventeenth century as a body of concepts and principles for determining the authenticity of medieval documents. The exploration reveals the extent to which legal, historical, and diplomatic methods operate within a framework of inferences, generalizations and probabilities; the degree to which those methods are rooted in observational principles; and the continuing validity of a best evidence principle for assessing record trustworthiness. The study concludes that, while the technological means of assessing and ensuring record trustworthiness have changed fundamentally over time, the underlying principles have remained remarkably consistent.
Item Metadata
Title |
Trusting records: the evolution of legal, historical, and diplomatic methods of assessing the trustworthiness of records from antiquity to the digital age
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Creator | |
Publisher |
University of British Columbia
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Date Issued |
1998
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Description |
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.
The trustworthiness of records as evidence is of particular interest to legal
and historical practitioners who need to ensure that records are trustworthy so that
justice may be realized or the past understood. Traditionally, the disciplines of law
and history have relied on the guarantee of trustworthiness inherent in the
circumstances surrounding the creation and maintenance of records. For records
created by bureaucracies, that trustworthiness has been ensured and protected
through the mechanisms of authority and delegation, and through procedural
controls exercised over record-writers and record-keepers.
As bureaucracies rely increasingly on new information and communication
technologies to create and maintain their records, the question that presents itself is
whether these traditional mechanisms and controls are adequate to the task of
verifying the degree of reliability and authenticity of electronic records, whose most
salient feature is the ease with which they can be invisibly altered and manipulated.
This study explores the evolution of means of assessing the trustworthiness
of records as evidence from antiquity to the digital age, and from the perspectives of
law and history; and examines recent efforts undertaken by researchers in the field
of archival science to develop methods for ensuring the trustworthiness of electronic
records specifically, based on a contemporary adaptation of diplomatics. Diplomatics
emerged in the seventeenth century as a body of concepts and principles for
determining the authenticity of medieval documents.
The exploration reveals the extent to which legal, historical, and diplomatic
methods operate within a framework of inferences, generalizations and probabilities;
the degree to which those methods are rooted in observational principles; and the
continuing validity of a best evidence principle for assessing record trustworthiness.
The study concludes that, while the technological means of assessing and ensuring
record trustworthiness have changed fundamentally over time, the underlying
principles have remained remarkably consistent.
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Extent |
12596263 bytes
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Genre | |
Type | |
File Format |
application/pdf
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Language |
eng
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Date Available |
2009-07-03
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Provider |
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
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Rights |
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.
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DOI |
10.14288/1.0076929
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URI | |
Degree | |
Program | |
Affiliation | |
Degree Grantor |
University of British Columbia
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Graduation Date |
1999-05
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Campus | |
Scholarly Level |
Graduate
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Aggregated Source Repository |
DSpace
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Item Media
Item Citations and Data
Rights
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.