Front matter and introduction

Since the beginning of digital record production by public administration, solutions for electronic records management in Romania were sought, notably without the involvement of the National Archives. Despite being the authority entrusted by law with the development, “in accordance with the provisions of this law, [of the] working rules and methodologies for the organisation and conduct of all archival activity”, the lack of vision of the past management of the National Archives and the insufficient training of the staff caused the institution’s involvement to be relatively shallow. The IT industry has taken centre stage, promoting solutions that deliver certain technological answers, but do not offer a professional recordkeeping and long term preservation perspective. Such an imbalanced approach soon came to reveal its flaws and limitations. This was dubbed by a change of perspective at the top management of the National Archives that led to a push to amend the Archival law (Law no. 201/2024) with the purpose of clarifying that records management is one integrated function regardless of the carrier, and that it should be the task of the National Archives to handle the methodological framework for the management of electronic records, too.

The initiative had the following objectives:
The project Archiving by design – a way to defy electronic records management challenges was initiated by The National Archives of Norway in cooperation with the National Archives of Romania, and it was sponsored by the Fund for Bilateral Relations within the EEA and Norway Grants 2014-2021. It ran for 15 months, starting from 1 January 2024, and the budget was 210.406 euro, 100% of which were non-refundable funds.

• Establishing a strategic concept to strengthen the competence and position of Romanian National Archives on digital born archives.
• Developing guidelines on implementing the “archiving by design” approach (AbD) for public sector organisations.
• Mutual sharing of experiences.

“Archiving by design” (hereafter AbD) is a proactive approach whose goal is to facilitate the development and/or deployment of business systems that support the processes associated with records management in a more effective way, addressing the issue of long-term preservation and accessibility of electronic records. This publication is the outcome of the activities carried out and the experiences gained throughout this project concerning the above-mentioned approach. It aims to serve as a tool for identifying the electronic records requirements that should integrated into the business systems of public administration.

Aside from the general policy at the institutional level, the current work also aims to prompt an update of the mindset – and tools – of the National Archives’ staff. According to traditional considerations that stem from a paper-based mindset:

• The general rules for records management should fit and be obeyed by all creators, no matter their specific processes. This raised the conundrum of regulation versus guidance: general provisions that are flexible and adaptable to different creators’ needs but are harder to monitor for compliance, or clear and detailed rules that are easier to enforce but less tailored to specific business processes.
• Preservation is an issue that is specific for the intermediate archives stage – that is, after the creation of records.
• The appraisal and disposition process mostly rely on content and documentary value, and less on the process that generated the records.
• If the rules are followed, then the National Archives is interested in details about records in the moment of the transfer of permanent records (which is theoretically and generally, 30 years after creation).
• The terminology used focuses on words that have a strong physical representation, like document, folder or inventory and have traditional definitions that ignore conceptualisations.The approach in the present work challenges this traditional perspective in many ways, in accordance with international practices and mainly with the principles advocated by the AbD approach. Examples of such challenges are:
• Setting rules for records management, while guided and directed by general rules and regulations, needs to be tailored to individual creators and their specific business processes, especially when record management rules need to be translated into records management controls and requirements for digital business systems. This is why the presence and the expertise of recordkeeping professionals is extremely valuable. The recordkeeping profession is much more than reading and interpreting an Archives Law.
• In the digital realm, the preservation aspect needs to be taken into consideration before the records are even created. The post-factum intervention may be extremely costly and, sometimes, unfeasible, or only possible at the risk of damaging content, metadata or records characteristics.
• The business process takes centre stage. Identifying the core or support processes and their needs for evidence will not only help adapt the records management rules to specific needs, but it will also help more accurately assess the value of records in context.
• As its social function is to preserve the memory of the society, the National Archives should play a more pro-active role in raising awareness and assisting creators in their records management activities, including in deploying business systems. To care about permanent electronic records only after 30 years, like in analogue records paradigm, would mean very likely to find or read anything.
• The main concepts tend to be more theoretical, focusing on data and information instead of record, on linkage and virtual aggregations instead of folders, on metadata sets instead of finding aids.