Wouldn't some form
of legal documentation suffice? A letter from the University President or
Legal Dept. stating "officially that as of 9/2002, all catalogs are issued
electronically, and have the same legal validity as the paper versions" would
seem to do it. I'm assuming the university is safe, legally, in moving to
e-catalogs, so if it's good enough for current business use, it should be good
enough for archival reference.
If, as you imply,
all the paper versions are considered legal tender for proving the course
existed as stated, the e-versions should do as well. The big problem is
the alterability (is that a word?) of electronic documents. While I know
PDF files (back to that again!) have a digital signature capability, I suppose
that could be altered too by a nefarious person, though I imagine if the
documentation states that the archives copy is the copy of record, as long as
yours stays unmolested, you should be fine.
I'd also raise the
possibility of using metadata to authenticate the catalog - in HTML, for
example, a comment in the header acknowledging it as the official copy.
Not knowing a lot about metadata in other formats, I'm not sure how else to do
it, but...
DS
______________________________________
Daniel Sokolow, Archives Coordinator
David Taylor Archives North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System 155 Community Drive Great Neck, NY
11021 mailto:dsokolow@nshs.edu
Glad to see this discussion renewed. Clearly,
their are several big problems with archiving. The mention of .ASP, for
example, as well as Cold Fusion, point to the fact that many 'pages' are
actually created on demand and quickly go out of existence. More to the point
as the data bases from which these pages are drawn including Oracle, Access,
and other 'traditional' data bases, but now include things live XML files and
the stylesheets and transformations that deliver a viewable product. Which
'page' or file is the one that should be archived? Since 'viewing' the xml
file really doesn't convey the information it represents (except to those who
really care to extract/interpret it) and the file is not visible except to
those with editorial privileges, this quickly descends into a technical
morass.
Obviously, for static pages there is always the
option for a paper (gasp) output. Or, there is the option of leaving the job
to someone who specializes in this task, like the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/index.html
But I would like to introduce a wrinkle that I
now face. Our college is about to do away with it's paper catalog. That is,
course descriptions will be available online only. We respond to several
queries each year from former students who require documentation (course
descriptions) for courses they took five, ten, twenty years ago. This may be
for degree, transfer, or certification purposes. Even if we 'archive' the
website, how can we in all honesty certify, as I am sometimes required to do,
that a copy of the site is a 'true representation' of the course description
from that time?
Wayne Miller
Plattsburgh State U of
NY
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