Distributed networks such as the Internet have altered the fundamental
way a record is created, captured, accessed and managed over time, and
therefore who controls, has access to, and is responsible for its
authenticity. Law and ethics provide the major sources of regulatory
controls over participants in such networks. This book analyses the
interrelationship of recordkeeping, ethics and law in terms of existing
regulatory models and their application to the Internet environment. It
proposes the legal and social relationship model as an analytical tool
for identifying the rights and obligations of recordkeeping participants
in networked 'business' transactions within communities of common
interest based on trust. The model is also used to examine the legal
concepts of property, access, privacy and evidence, with particular
reference to its Internet context. As legal relationships have their
basis in the law of obligations found in both common and civil law
systems, as well as archival science, the model has a broad-based
application. The approach in this book has been to reconcile a number of
archival traditions - the common strands rather than the differences, in
particular concepts of identity, trust, acts, actors, and social
relationships - as fundamental concepts to social regulation. It is
therefore primarily directed to archives and records academics and
practitioners (especially those working within the realm of electronic
records), in order to provide them with a sound theoretical and
practical knowledge of the legal and ethical dimensions of records
created in distributed environments.
