AIIM study analyzes life span of information

The expanded use of electronic documents has spawned debate regarding the legality of those documents in court. AIIM (Silver Spring, MD, http://www.aiim.org/tradeshow) has released a report on document life cycle management that addresses the legal admissibility and authentication issues of electronic information and the legal and fiscal requirements for document retention periods.

The report, commissioned by AIIM's Film-Based Imaging Task Force, focuses on document storage in corporate and government applications and analyzes the requirements for information archive and retrieval systems.

The study reveals that no single storage medium--paper, micrographics, optical and electronic files--can satisfy all requirements for every document management application. The study also shows that electronic documents may satisfy record-keeping requirements specified in laws and government regulations. When properly authenticated, electronic documents are admissible as evidence in trials or other legal proceedings.

Dr. William Saffady, professor in the School of Information Science and Policy at the State University of New York at Albany, prepared the report for AIIM. He stated, "Lifetime estimates and optimal storage conditions for computer media have not been defined by national or international standards. Now that electronic documents have become central to mainstream corporate and government applications, the need for standards is intensifying.