Background and assumptions
Incorporating the TNA Requirements
In stage one, step three of the tool kit we referenced best practice and requirements standards. The National Archives 2002 "Requirements for Electronic Records Management Systems" provides ten sets of core requirements and three additional sets of optional requirements. They cover almost all the ERM requirements you could have but only some of the Electronic document and content management requirements you may have. They cover some but by no means all the input and output requirements you may have and they cover hardly any of the collaboration and business process management requirements you may have. The ten core requirements and three optional sets of requirements are as detailed in the table.
| Core requirements | ||
| A.1 | Record organisation | Classification scheme and Fileplan |
| A.2 | Record capture, declaration and management | Capture, declaration, record types, record metadata, move, copy, extract and relate, bulk import. |
| A.3 | Search, display and presentation | Searching; Display; Presentation |
| A.4 | Retention and disposal | Disposal schedules definition, allocation, execution; resolving conflicts, review, export and transfer and destruction |
| A.5 | Access control | Access to ERMS; access control and markings; user profiles; roles; groups; allocation of access control to classes, folders and records; custodian; execution of access control markings; privacy and opening of records |
| A.6 | Audit | Audit |
| A.7 | Reporting | Reporting |
| A.8 | Usability | Usability |
| A.9 | Design and Performance | Integrity, Interfaces, Disaster recovery, Storage, Performance, Scalability |
| A.10 | Compliance with other standards | Optional requirements |
| B.1 | Authentication and encryption | Electronic signatures; Electronic watermarks; encryption |
| B.2 | Document management | Document management |
| B.3 | Hybrid and physical folder management | Physical folders; markers; retrieval and access control; tracking and circulation; disposal. |
This poses some questions when it comes to assembling your full statement of functional requirements. Do you split up the TNA requirements and include them in your set? Do you simply ask the suppliers whether they are compliant with the TNA requirements and then not reproduce them at all or do you include the TNA requirements as one sub section of your functional requirements and then cover the additional requirements under the four headings of Input; Management; Output and Collaboration/BPM?
We favour keeping the TNA requirements together as a sub section of the Management section and referring to one or more of the thirteen sets of TNA requirements where relevant from other sections as outlined below.
The situation on supplier approval may well change significantly after this toolkit was produced in June 2004. At that time there were only six suppliers approved by the National Archives and some 15 plus suppliers were thought to be in the process of applying for approval.
With only six approved you would be restricting your choice significantly if you mandated that suppliers must be TNA approved. An alternative approach is to include the TNA requirements in your SOR in section three sub section - management - and to produce an overall compliance grid that covers all the requirements in the SOR including the TNA requirements. You then ask suppliers whether they have been formally approved by the TNA.
If they have then you ask them to simply indicate on the compliance grid any of the TNA requirements they did not meet and what they intend to do to try and meet them in future. [This is because a supplier can be approved by TNA even if they do not meet some of the optional requirements].
If the supplier has not been formally approved by the TNA then you should require them to respond to every TNA requirement in the grid and indicate whether they are compliant or not and if not what they intend to do to meet that requirement in future.
If you are reading this toolkit in 2005 and there are 10 or more suppliers approved by the TNA then you may decide to mandate that the supplier's software has been formally approved by TNA. They list approved suppliers on their web site.
One other important standard relating to metadata is the e-GMS (Government Metadata Standard). This lays down the elements, refinements and encoding schemes to be used by government officers when creating metadata for their information resources or designing search interfaces for information systems. It is reviewed as part of the "management" section below.
