Iacovino L. (Ed.) Recordkeeping, Ethics and Law. Regulatory Models, Participant Relationships and Rights and Responsibilities in the Online World

Springer, 2006. - 349 p.
ISBN: 978-1-4020-4691-9Distributed 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. However, it is also directed to other disciplines and professions in areas critical to the development of the information economy, such as electronic commerce and encryption policies. Thus policy makers, managers, corporate lawyers, business professionals, ethicists, probity officers and information technology disciplines are also a primary audience. Most importantly the book aims to further interdisciplinary bridges between those researching, teaching and working in ethics, law and archival science, thus specialists in the area of interdisciplinarity may also find the book a useful model of interdisciplinary analysis.
The book is a revised version of a Ph.D. thesis, Ethical-Legal Frameworks for Recordkeeping: Regulatory Models, Participants and their Rights and Obligations, Monash University, Melbourne, 2002. While the original research focused primarily, but not exclusively on, the Australian legal context, the book has retained Australian examples where it was found necessary to illustrate a concept or model. In addition, examples from other jurisdictions have been added to provide an international perspective and as the basis for future comparative studies.