US-InterPARES Project (American Team)

Findings on the Preservation of Authentic Electronic Records
Welcome to US-InterPARES, the website for the American team participating in InterPARES 2, (International research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems). The records generated by society in the course of its bureaucratic, research, and creative activities need to be preserved, sometimes permanently, as critical instruments of accountability, as means of protecting individual and institutional rights, as cultural documentation, and as sources of information for future research and study. Physical care of records is not sufficient, however, to ensure their preservation for the protection, perpetuation, and advancement of modern society. The trustworthiness and retrievability of the records that are to be kept must also be guaranteed as the records move forward through time and across technologies.

InterPARES 2 is a multidisciplinary, international project that builds on the InterPARES 1 Project which concluded in January 2002. InterPARES 2 aims to develop a theoretical understanding of the records generated by interactive, dynamic, and experiential systems, of their process of creation, and of their present and potential use in the scientific, government, and artistic sectors. On the basis of this understanding, the project will formulate and test technological, metadata, and policy methodologies, models and strategies for:

Past Events:

East Coast US InterPARES 2 Symposium Washington, D.C.
Friday, October 21st, 2005

West Coast US InterPARES 2 Symposium
May 15th, UCLA

• ensuring that records created using these systems can be trusted as to their content (that is, are reliable and accurate) and as records (that is, are authentic) while used by the creator;

• selecting those that have to be kept for legal, administrative, social or cultural reasons after they are no longer needed by the creator;

• preserving them in authentic form over the long term; and,

• analyzing and evaluating advanced technologies for the implementation of these methodologies in a way that respects cultural diversity and pluralism.

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The work of the American team participating in InterPARES 2 is funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the National Science Foundation and is administered from the School of Information and Policy at the University of Albany, State University of New York, under the direction of Dr. Philip Eppard; and from the Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, under the direction of Dr. Anne Gilliland-Swetland.

The InterPARES Project is administered from the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, under the direction of Dr. Luciana Duranti. For further information, visit www.interpares.org.