What makes an electronic record trustworthy?

An electronic record is trustworthy when you can rely on it to be what it claims to be, to be complete and unaltered, and to be understandable — now and years from now. Because digital records depend on software, formats, and storage that all change over time, trustworthiness has to be actively maintained rather than assumed.

The four qualities

The international standard ISO 15489 describes four characteristics of an authoritative record:

• Authenticity — the record is genuinely what it purports to be, created or sent by the person or system it claims, at the stated time.
• Reliability — its content can be trusted as a full and accurate representation of the activity it documents.
• Integrity — the record is complete and unaltered; any permitted changes are documented.
• Usability — the record can be located, retrieved, presented, and interpreted.

Content, context, and structure

To keep those qualities, an electronic record must preserve three things together:

• Content — the information itself.
• Context — the metadata that situates it: who created it, when, in what process, and how it relates to other records.
• Structure — its format and the relationships among its parts, so it displays and behaves as intended.

Strip away the context or structure and a file becomes hard to trust or even interpret.

What maintains trustworthiness

Practical measures include reliable capture with sufficient metadata, access controls that prevent unauthorized change, audit trails that record every action taken on a record, and preservation strategies (such as format migration and integrity/fixity checks) that protect records against obsolescence and decay over time. A records system that does these things lets an organization produce, years later, a record it can stand behind as evidence. See the electronic records management hub for more.