Anne Thurston

Managing Records and Information for Open, Accountable and Inclusive Governance in the Digital Era: Lessons from Nordic Countries

International goals for open, accountable, and inclusive governance rest on the assumption that trustworthy information is available in the digital environment and that it can be opened to citizens and shared reliably through strategies for openness and digital governance. However, in many countries the evidence base and the underpinning legal and control framework needed to make openness possible have not been developed.

International good practice standards and practices are available to address these gaps, and we can map them to the needs of any country. However, to really understand the importance of managing digital records and data and the framework needed to achieve this, it is valuable to look countries that excel in this area. The presentation looks at three Nordic countries, Estonia, Finland and Norway, with the aim of understanding:

What is involved in managing digital information? What are the benefits?What are the risks of not managing this resource?What are the challenges?What needs to change?

The presentation explores the intersection of openness, digital governance, and information in the three countries with the aim of identifying lessons learned that can support the same objectives in lower resource countries. Each of the countries studied: places a high social value on openness and

promoting social rights is committed to using technology for high

quality service provision, including care for vulnerable groups in society

is committed to using information as an essential resource for national development.

The Nordic approach emphasizes evidence-based decision making, with high quality information from across the public administration as a basis for formulating and implementing meaningful policies, planning, and providing services. Although the approach differs, all three of the countries invest in managing digital records and data. They apply international standards to achieve high quality information.

The three governments share a strong focus on ‘whole-of-government strategy steering’ and maximizing opportunities of digital government, with an emphasis on interoperability solutions for public administration and for sharing and reusing information. One of the greatest challenges they face is ‘siloed’ institutional arrangements, a situation that leads to duplicated efforts and reduces the governments’ capacity to use integrated information resources effectively.

Estonia: Information Governance

and the Information Society

National Context

As a small country positioned at the gateway between Europe and Russia, Estonia has experienced wave after wave of occupiers for centuries. Annexation by the Soviet Union in 1940 lasted essentially until 1991. Through these experiences, Estonia developed a highly adaptable culture, with a deep commitment to freedom, self-determination, and preservation of national identity. At independence, Estonia committed itself to using technology to support democracy, services to citizens, and sustainable economic growth.

In 1991 Estonia had very little IT infrastructure and few resources for large scale IT development, but from the mid 1990s onward, its IT skill base developed rapidly. The Government invested in centralized core systems to keep costs low, and this resulted in highly innovative and efficient solutions. The values of innovation, openness, and transparency, deeply rooted in Estonian administrative culture, are expressed in its concept that public sector information should be available to the public without the public having to ask for it.

Alongside the focus on information technology, Estonia recognizes the need to manage digital information as the evidence base for a high standard of service delivery. Its approach is to apply internationally agreed standards and principles to any type of public sector information that can serve as evidence, whether it is paper based, a relational database, or system generated digital records. Linking information governance to efficient, quality service provision is increasingly seen as a key aspect of increasing transparency.

Interoperability is a cornerstone for Estonia’s technology development. Interoperability rules were introduced at the end of the 1990s, and today most public databases are interoperable. Most public records in Estonia are created, exchanged, and received electronically, and once information has been gathered from citizens, agencies across government are able to reuse it. The aim is to link the whole Estonian information system into a common logical unit comprising public records and data and the technological systems used to create and manage them.

Estonian citizens have benefitted significantly from technological developments. For over a decade, they have used on-line services for banking and for communication with the state, which is now paper-free in many areas of public administration. All core information services for citizens are available on the web; for instance, 98% of Estonians use online tax declaration, and any doctor, with a patient’s consent, can consult a medical history. It is possible to establish a business rapidly online and deliver all reports electronically.

Estonia joined the Open Government Partnership in the spring of 2012. Its main goals in joining were to draw attention to the quality of state governance and learn from the experience of other states, while sharing its own good practices, especially in the areas of e-governance and public sector ICT use.

Legal Framework

Constitution

The Estonian Constitution guarantees all citizens free access to public information by making all government agencies and local authorities and their officials legally responsible for providing information about their activities to any citizen of Estonia, except where the law prohibits disclosure and the information is intended exclusively for internal use.

Public Information Act (2000)The Act was passed to underpin democracy, the social rule of law, and an open society. It requires that all citizens be able to access public information in order to exercise their rights and freedoms, meet their obligations, and monitor the performance of public duties. The Act creates a presumption of openness unless there is a reason for legal closure, for instance personal privacy. It requires information holders to ensure access to information in the quickest and easiest manner possible. Access must be granted without charge unless the law prescribes payment for direct expenses relating to the release of the information.

Archives Act (2011)

The Act defines a record as information on any medium created or received in the course of public activities; an archival record contains evidence of facts or activities of long-term national value. It requires agencies and persons performing public duties to ensure that official records are preserved and remain useful until their transfer to the National Archives when no longer needed administratively, or within 10 years of creation or receipt. The Act mandates that access must be unrestricted unless legal restrictions apply, for instance under the the Personal Data Protection Act or the State Secrets Act.

Governance Framework

Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications

The Ministry is responsible for secure technological development, innovation policy, and a standardized a user-friendly service environment. It drafts and implements economic policy and coordinates information technology and interoperability issues. It is a member of the DLM Forum, which supports shared approaches to information governance among the government, commercial, and academic sectors across Europe. Two key departments of the Ministry play essential roles in information governance: Department of State Information Systems and Department of Information Society Services Development.

Department of State Information Systems

The Department coordinates the development and administration of national information systems through the Information System Authority to provide the best possible services to citizens. It provides the basic infrastructure for connecting important state information systems and their data, implements policies for maintaining the core IT infrastructure, coordinates state IT-policy and development plans, and oversees IT standardization. The State System Authority develops and has day-to-day oversight of an extensive set of interconnected information systems.

Key Systems

Administration System of the State Information System: an overarching system that provides information on state’s information systems and databases, data collected and processed in the systems, services provided, and who uses them.

X Road: a secure central infrastructure that allows public institutions, private sector enterprises, and citizens to securely access and exchange data to facilitate service provision. It connects over 1000 institutions and several hundred information systems and facilitates several thousand machine-to-machine and web services.

Document Exchange Centre (DEC): an infrastructure for transmitting documents (letters, draft legislation, financial documents, electronic forms) and their metadata, using X-Road. It makes it possible to interface dispersed information systems, including document management systems, accounting systems, and it supports the transfer of documents to appropriate long-term repositories. Citizens and entrepreneurs can use the service to send and receive letters to and from any state or local government agency.

Department of Information Society Services Development

The Department sets policies for effective information society services, records management, and information governance. It links digital records management to service provision to support electronic handling, improve reporting, increase transparency, and safeguard and preserve information as evidence on any media. The aim is to strengthen the potential for the information society, and improve state policy formulation through high-quality information and data usage.

The Department coordinates records and information governance policies and systems to ensure that digital records remain reliable over long periods, can be used as evidence of facts or activities, and are easy to access. To support access, detailed electronic registers are maintained across government agencies and are available on agency websites to allow citizens to access the records they require. Access restrictions are described explicitly, and the registers include descriptions of sensitive records closed for legal reasons.

In 2014, the Department and the National Archives jointly prepared Guidelines on Minimum Requirements for Estonian Public Sector Document and Records Management Systems, based on international records and information management standards for managing records in a digital environment. The guidelines support public service providers and records managers in state authorities and local government agencies in managing processes, enhancing records system interoperability, and facilitating document and data exchange.

The Department and the National Archives also worked together to prepare a standardized set of minimum metadata requirements based on an extensive study of metadata requirements in countries including the UK, Germany, Canada, and Norway. The view is that well managed metadata enhances the ability to search across public document registers, exchange records between organizations and information systems via DEC, and archive and reuse information.

A Records Management Board, comprising records management officers from all ministries, representatives of local governments, the Department of Information Society Services and Development, the National Archives, and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, provides support in defining the direction of digital records management development. It develops and implements records management guidelines. Ultimately, the aim is to manage the information lifecycle/ continuum as a whole under one ministry, with a common approach and common rules.

National ArchivesThe National Archives, an agency under the Ministry of Education and science, is responsible for ensuring the preservation and usability of society's written memory for future generations. Its role is to protect cultural heritage, facilitate comparative research, and provide an historical context for development. It collaborates with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication on issues relating to the information society, and it works with government agencies to protect information integrity.

The Archives stays at the leading edge of professional development through regular involvement with international and European good practice initiatives. The E-ARK research project, funded by the European Commission, is particularly significant. In co-operation with commercial systems providers, research institutions, and other European National Archives, the project is developing a scalable pan-European methodology for reducing risk of information loss. It synthesizes existing national and international good practices for keeping records and databases authentic and usable through time.

The Archives’ extensive experience in digital information management enables it to work with government agencies to ensure that records and data with long-term value are transferred to its repository and preserved, whether they are paper based, relational databases, or digital records produced by administrative systems, ensuring that everything that can be opened legally is open.

Transition to Information Governance

As part of its Digital Agenda 2020, The Government is committed to moving from records management to a more holistic approach to information governance to support smarter governance and help increase the efficiency and cost effectiveness of public services. A changeover strategy is being prepared to plan the necessary measures, activities, and priorities. This will not change the essential importance of managing records as evidence, but it will involve a broader approach to managing information across government.

To support the vision, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication has prepared guidelines for managing and evaluating information quality in relationship to public sector e-services. The Archives has started to create practical guidelines for classifying and appraising information held in relational database systems to support agencies in extending their records retention plans beyond traditional systems. Over the next several years, these developments will be implemented throughout the public sector in relation to existing systems.

Open data is an essential aspect of information governance. The aim is to make high quantity, precise, trustworthy data available to the public and to companies as a basis for developing new services, products, and data analytics solutions. National collaboration on open data is managed through a cross-government board, led by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication, that is defining new laws, procedures, and structures for governing data collection, management, and release. While the aim is to open all public data as rapidly as possible, the Data Protection Agency and the Ministry of Justice are analyzing potential threats to individuals’ rights and state security to help define the pace at which data is opened.

Challenges

When European Union funding made it possible to kick start extensive work on ICT innovations at the beginning of the century, new systems were introduced as funds became available. Aspects of long-term information management and semantic and technical interoperability tended to be overlooked. Initially the functionality needed to support information retention, destruction, and export for transfer to long-term repositories did not feature in the equation, and metadata standards were not available to underpin system development. Legacy issues and their consequences now are beginning to be visible.

For example, security algorithms in the digital signature format, set up in the early 2000s to keep signatures secure, are becoming obsolete, making digitally signed records potentially vulnerable to hacking. A new format was introduced in January 2015 to add higher levels of security, but a re-signing mechanism is not yet available. Because retention and disposition rules have not been applied consistently, many digitally signed records have remained in the creating agencies. In the future, older algorithms may not be available to validate the signatures, which could undermine the authenticity of the records. Early transfer to the Archives would have enabled decryption.

A related issue involves the lack of standardized metadata requirements in early records management systems. This has made the uptake of standardized interoperability rules more challenging and time consuming than it would have been had there been had metadata requirements been standardized early on. The situation is gradually improving as metadata rules are have become commonplace when systems are replaced or updated.

The lack of explicit rules on the quality and extent of record descriptions also presents a challenge. While the public sector now generally accepts requirements for publishing descriptions of records on their websites, agencies sometimes use generic titles and descriptions to divert attention from the records’ content, which means that potential users find it difficult to track an issue through the agency registers. This has an impact on the agencies’ ability to open records and data proactively.

As a final example, the interoperability of public databases has led to a situation where the agency maintaining the database is not necessarily the same as the creator of a public service, because when databases are connected to the X-Road, virtually any agency can use the data and mash it up into new services. As these services provide additional context to the data, there can be difficulties in reflecting the provenance and distributed context. Work on these questions is at an early stage, but they will need to be solved before information governance can become a reality.

Conclusion

Estonia is making one of the most rapid transitions to an information society of any country in the world, and Estonians are experiencing substantial benefits. However, like other technologically advanced countries, the Government of Estonia faces challenges in managing the authenticity and integrity of its digital information. It is studying and applying internationally agreed standards, and drawing on experiences of other countries, to define new solutions for managing records and data as a national resource and to apply records management principles to all its digital resources.

As Estonia moves toward enhanced interoperability, security, and digital continuity through greater standardization, information governance is making an increasingly important contribution to achieving openness, transparency and self-determination. Other countries, whether they are more or less well resourced, will have much to learn from Estonia’s bold and creative approach to the issues involved.

Finland: Transparency and Citizen

Participation

National Context

Government transparency, social inclusion, and public access to information are long-established traditions in Finland. The Swedish Access to Public Records Act of 1766, the oldest FOI law in the world, was applied in Finland while Finland was part of the Swedish Kingdom (until 1809). As early as 1859, the archives of the Finnish Senate, which evolved into the National Archives, were opened to the public.

Finland remained a largely agrarian country until the 1950s. Thereafter it developed rapidly as an advanced, industrialized economy, one of the strongest in Europe. Simultaneously, it built an extensive Nordic-style welfare state. In the 1990s, Finland transformed itself into a knowledge economy, driven by the information and communications sector. In the process, Finland’s public administration became a vehicle for economic development, service delivery, and the realization of Finnish values of social solidarity, equality, and openness.

Finland published its first explicit strategy for an information society in 1995, with an emphasis on quality of life, knowledge, and competitiveness. When a new wave of transparency reforms began in the late 1990s, law and policy concerning transparency and secrecy were updated to enable private individuals to monitor public authorities and their use of public resources; the relationship between openness and the need for information management was articulated.

Finland joined the Open Government Partnership in 2013 to work with others towards active citizen participation and open government.  The crosscutting theme of its OGP National Action is citizen participation.

Legal Framework

Public sector information management is a significant issue for public administration in Finland and is guided by a series of interrelated laws. Underpinned by the Constitution, the principle of the openness of government activities and administrative processes, as the basis for an informed and just society, runs throughout all of these laws.

Constitution

The Constitution notes specifically that documents and recordings in the possession of the authorities are public, unless their publication has for compelling reasons been specifically restricted by an Act. Everyone has the right of access to public documents and recordings.

Archives Act (1994)

The Act defines a record as a written or pictorial presentation that can be read, heard, or understood with the aid of technical equipment. It covers records created by national and municipal government offices, courts of law and institutions applying the law, government and municipal enterprises, and persons carryings out public duties. It supports the right of private individuals and institutions to obtain information from records open to public inspection, provided that the legal rights and privacy are protected.

Act on the Openness of Government Activities (1999, replacing an earlier act of 1951)

The Act identifies requirements for good information management practice to support openness: availability, useability, integrity, and data protection. It lays down provisions for access to information based on the principle that everyone has the right to official documents in the public domain unless prohibited by law, for instance, records relating to the Government Foreign Affairs Committee, criminal investigations, or state security. The Act is unusual in identifying good information management practices, particularly when the information is used as the basis for decisions.

Act on Information Management Governance in Public Administration

(2011):

The Act requires public authorities to plan and specify their information governance strategies to support effective access to information through administrative processes and to protect information integrity. Provisions are established for safeguarding public sector information systems interoperability. The Act gives the Ministry of Finance overall responsibility for steering public sector authorities’ information management and promoting and safeguarding public sector information technology interoperability and security to improve service provision.

Governance Framework

Ministry of Finance

The Ministry plays a vital national role in steering information technology and information management. With the increase of information networks in all public services, there is growing emphasis on harmonizing operational procedures through an overall information management architecture and common structures for information systems. The aim is to facilitate evidence-based, customer oriented public services, interoperable processes, reuse of public sector information, and data security seamlessly public sector across agencies.

Led by the Ministry of Finance, Finland’s Open Data Program has been working to eliminate obstacles to reusing public data and creating preconditions for making more public sector data open. A systematic process for opening data has been adopted as a part of the budgetary framework process with the goal of developing a systematic process for releasing open data. The approach is that the rules and practices concerning integrity and longevity of public sector information concern also apply to open data.

The Ministry is in the early stages of building a National Data Exchange Layer that will integrate information systems; it should be in production by the end of 2015. Finland is collaborating closely with Estonia in its efforts to maximize service provision through digital governance, and the latest version of Estonia’s X-Road will be used in Finland as a part of the National Service Architecture. Estonia and Finland plan to work together to further develop X-road together in the future.

National Archives

The Archives, which comes under the Ministry of Education and Culture, is responsible for determining the value of the records of state authorities as permanent archives, disposing of those without ongoing value, preserving and making available those of national significance, and providing research and information services. It operates an extensive program to digitize documents for permanent preservation as a Digital Archive.

The Archives’ responsibility for preserving the memory of the nation inevitably involves playing a key role in protecting and preserving information integrity in the digital environment, where decisions made at the point of creation affect the ability to manage, preserve and use records and data through time. Archives staff have in-depth knowledge of the management controls needed to document the content and context of digital records and data. They continually upgrade their skills by participating in regional and international professional activities and by collaborating closely with other national archives in the region.

Quality control in Finnish record keeping has long been achieved through through registry systems that captured metadata for incoming and outgoing records in registers. This principle remains central to Finland’s digital records management strategy. Everything that comes into to and leaves a government agency goes through the registry office and is recorded, linked to an administrative process, and entered in an Electronic Document and Records Management System. This makes it possible to trace records to meet RTI requests and demonstrate accountability.

At present, the Archives has statutory authority for providing binding regulations for managing records and metadata of permanent value to the nation across state and municipal public sector agencies. The SÄHKE Records Management Standard, introduced in 2005, defines required record-keeping metadata elements and metadata fields to provide a standardized basis for access control, usability, integrity, and authenticity, It also defines an XML-scheme for exporting records from digital systems to allow for consistently transferring digital records to long-term custody from diverse systems.

 

In 2012, the Archives began work on techniques, tools, methods, and practices for protecting and preserving authenticity, integrity, and usability of information in databases and registers. Thousands of registers and databases have been used in public administration over several decades, but much, if not most of this information is at risk of being lost inadvertently. Without accurate, and consistent metadata and contextual information, data may have little or no value. Fields and codes can change through time, frequently with inadequate documentation of changes. Moreover, several authorities may jointly maintain a database, making making documentation difficult to trace.

Challenges

The primary challenge for managing digital information in Finland at present is clarifying management responsibility. Digital information management is is governed by different laws, with the involvement of three ministries - Finance, Education, and Justice. The relationships, roles and responsibilities of the different authorities involved, particularly those of the Ministry of Finance and the National Archives, tend to overlap and be unclear. There is collaboration but not yet a unified strategy. A new model is needed to define how the strengths of these can come together in a holistic approach.

A new act is to be developed to provide a coordinated approach to the entire lifecycle or continuum of information management in relation to goals for digital governance and openness across state and municipality authorities. The aim is to combine and harmonize laws and regulations concerning information management, including provisions for access to information rights, openness, and secrecy. The new law will provide a basis for harmonizing standards for managing ICT, for instance standards for interoperability and for security and managing digital records, and data.

The Archives role in defining requirements for managing the lifecycle of digital information will change. The records management standard is being re-examined as part of the process of redesigning the approach to information management to harmonize it with digital governance and ensure that it is applicable at the national and municipal levels. From the end of 2015, records and data management will be defined in the Administrative Regulations issued by the Ministry of Finance.

SÄHKE will be replaced by an Administrative Regulation covering the functional requirements for an ERMS, some data management issues, open data issues, and the issue of secrecy and openness. Once the new regulation is accepted and formalized as a standard, it may become a decree. Given the powerful role of the Ministry of Finance, the scope and contribution digital records and data management could be greatly enhanced. National Archives staff, whose deep professional expertise in managing and preserving digital records and data, will have an invaluable contribution to make.

Conclusion

The Government of Finland views information management as a key aspect of maximizing opportunities of digital government and supporting openness. Its framework of information management-related laws supports the values of social solidarity and equality in a complex digital environment. Finland recognizes the need to go further to harmonize laws and practices for managing digital records and data with goals for customer oriented public services, good IT governance, interoperable processes and services, reuse of public sector information, and data security.

As part of the process, the roles of the Ministry of Finance, the Archives, and the Ministry of Justice are being reconfigured harmonize their mutually complementary information management expertise. Finland’s innovative highlights the need for a fresh vision to meet the challenges of protecting and preserving high quality digital information and maximizing its value to citizens. All countries will need to address this essential issue if goals for digital governance and openness are to succeed, and Finland’s bold approach will demonstrate the potential for positive change.

Norway: Information Integrity and

Access to Information

National Context

One of the most open governments in the world, Norway has achieved a remarkably high degree of information integrity and accessibility in the digital environment. Its aim is to make government as accountable, transparent, and democratic as possible. Its ICT policy, makes information technology a national priority, and its longstanding commitment to managing digital information has developed in parallel. Norway’s unique achievements in terms of protecting the quality of public sector information and making it easily available to citizens, journalists, and anyone who needs it, provide the foundation for a unique and advanced approach to Right to Information.

Norway was one of the first countries to recognize the significance, challenges, and benefits of managing information integrity and access in the digital environment. Its approach has been to ensure that high quality authoritative digital records and data are available as a basis for accountability, transparency, service provision, and citizens’ rights. Norway was the first country in the world, in 1984, to recognize that information integrity does not happen automatically but is achieved through well-defined control framework and a fixed set of model requirements for managing digital information systems.

Norway’s leading edge approach to openness is achieved through a powerful combination of interconnected laws, standards, well-defined metadata architectures, and technology systems. Among the most striking aspects of its approach are the emphasis on protecting the security, content, and context of the information, and on reducing the time between creating records and public access. This has enabled Norway, through its approach to right to information, to give its citizens rapid, almost real time, access to reliable records as evidence of policies, actions, activities, and expenditure, making openness real and concrete, not just a vision for the future.

Norway has participated in Open Government Partnership since it was initiated in in 2010; it was one of the eight founding OGP governments. Norway’s action planning for open government has emphasized the necessity for financial openness connected to the income from the petroleum sector. In addition Norway has wanted to to share knowledge on, and experiences with, developing an open and well functioning public sector.  In the next phase of its OGP plan, Norway will follow up in areas including improving access to information, facilitating democratic participation in government and enhancing fiscal transparency and financial integrity.

Legal and Administrative Framework

Norway’s Constitution, National Archives Act and national record-keeping standard, and Freedom of Information Act, work together provide the legal basis for Norway’s unique and powerful approach to open access to information. Their intersection makes it possible for Norway’s citizens to monitor what their government is doing, claim their rights effectively, and play a significant role in influencing the affairs of state. Journalists can regularly track and report on what the government is doing on the basis of in-depth, reliable, and readily available evidence. Public sector agencies are able to plan and monitor programs, activities, and expenditure on the basis of consistently trustworthy information.

Constitution

Norway’s constitution, first adopted in 1814, has been amended over the years to reflect an ever-deepening commitment to openness and transparency. Article 100 states, ‘Everyone has a right of access to documents of the State and municipal administration and a right to follow the proceedings of the courts and democratically elected bodies. Limitations to this right may be prescribed by law to protect the privacy of the individual or for other weighty reasons.’

National Archives Act

The National Archives, established in 1817, is almost as old as the constitution. The Archives Act of 1992 sets out the Archives’ responsibilities for overseeing the creation, management, and preservation of records, in any form, that document public institutions’ functions and exercise of authority; provide information of general interest to society; and establish the obligations and privileges of people and organizations. The Act requires public organisations to register all incoming, outgoing, and internal records that generate or document official activity in the national records management system, Noark.

Noark

As in many European countries, public sector records in Norway have long been managed through a registry system that captures metadata about incoming and outgoing correspondence. Once registered, records cannot be altered without authorization and evidence that achange that has been made. By the early 1980s, the National Archives recognized the need to manage digital records and capture the metadata that gave them their legal authority, and it began to develop good practice requirements for digital records management.

Noark (Norwegian Model Requirements for Electronic Records Management Systems), was introduced in 1984 to support state accountability and openness. Building on the concept of metadata management as the basis for information integrity, it introduced a set of mandatory functional requirements for building quality from the point of creation and establishing predictability, consistency, traceability, and searchability. Also, in 1984, the Archives introduced guidelines and instructions for managing digital records in the public sector. Initially, the Governmental Rationalisation Directorate was responsible for Noark, but responsibility was transferred to The National Archives in 1990.

Noark built upon principles defined in the Governance Act (1967) and the Freedom of Information Act (1970), which defined mandatory core metadata elements (date of registration, record number, sender/ recipient information, description of content or subject, document date, classification code, date, and method of processing) needed to fix the integrity of digital information. Noark extended the required set of metadata. By identifying, labelling, and coherently structuring the records, it dramatically reduced the possibility of unauthorised deletion, alteration, or manipulation.

The 1970 Freedom of Information Act also required agencies to produce a public register of incoming and outgoing documents, and from the outset, Noark included a system requirement to generate this register (the offentlig postjournal) as the means of locating electronic records and protecting their integrity. The register was printed and made available through government press centers.

Noark was not mandatory for government agencies until 1999, but it quickly became a de facto standard for public sector Electronic Document and Records Management Systems (EDRMS). By 1990, when responsibility for the Noark Standard was transferred from the Governmental Rationalisation Directorate to the Archives, more than 90 government institutions, including all ministries, were using Noark systems. Noark systems were recognised as having better functionality and stability than other records and document systems, and long before Noark was mandatory, records created in government agencies were largely compliant.

After the launch of Noark 3 in 1994, the mandatory ‘offentlig postjournal’, or public register of metadata for incoming and outgoing documents was uploaded to a web-based, password-protected platform, the Electronic Records Registry (EPJ). Initially, it was not mandatory to upload metadata to the EPJ, but soon all ministries were participating. From this time onward there was a standardized method of uploading metadata from records management systems to the public register, enabling subscribing newspapers and television agencies to access to public information easily.

Initially, agencies with non-standardised systems did not have to comply with Noark. Without a standard for mapping and structuring the content, the relationship between metadata and documents it was difficult to trace and capture, making it hard to locate, use, give access to, and preserve the records. A lot of information was lost or later became inaccessible. In 2008, Noark 5 was introduced to define a core of minimal mandatory requirements for achieving records quality and enabling ongoing integrity and preservation in all systems. Less rigid than the earlier versions, it could be applied flexibly in a wide range of contexts, from the simplest to the most complex.

Right to Information and The Electronic Public Records

Register, OEP

Norway’s Freedom of Information Act of 1970 has been strengthened several times. The revised act of 2006 took the Right to Information to a new level by requiring that government agencies post standardized metadata daily to the central Electronic Records Register. The register was re-launched, in May 2010 by the Agency for Public Management and e-Government under the Directorate for Governance and ICT (Difi) as the Offentlig Elektronisk Postjournal (Electronic Public Records - OEP). The database was no longer password protected; anyone with Internet access could use it.

The OEP, now a core part of Norway’s approach to public sector transparency and democracy, has enabled a remarkable degree of openness. Having located relevant records, users can submit FOI access requests through the OEP to the responsible agencies, which process requests and forward copies of the records to users by email, fax or regular mail, normally within two to three days. Government agencies can choose to provide related information as well, so instead of releasing the one requested document, the agency may choose to give 15. There are no restrictions on reuse and there is no charge.

By the end of 2012, the OEP contained over five million registry entries published by 105 government agencies. It was processing about 20,000 information requests a month, with the greatest number of requests coming from journalists (50%); citizens and businesses made up 22% of requests, public employees 21%, and researchers 3%. The Government is considering the possibility of providing direct access to digital records from the OEP with the aim of making administration more open and transparent and enabling government agencies to work more efficiently.

Although the OEP provides access to email registered in the Noark system, capturing email is remains a thorny challenge. In theory all email into and out of government agencies is to be captured in the Noark system, with metadata being recorded as it is for other documents. However, capture is not automated as part of the electronic records systems, and employees often do not want to spend time registering email. As email becomes increasingly significant for public administration, there is increasing awareness of the issue.

Digital Preservation

At the beginning of 2014, the Archives introduced an open source Trusted Digital Repository system developed by a Swedish supplier and adapted for national and municipal use in Norway and in Sweden. The system provides a technology-neutral means of preserving public sector records using standardised digital preservation models and complying with international security and metadata standards. The metadata provides the means of locating, interpreting, and interrelating the information, and of facilitating migration and conversion to new formats and software and hardware environments as necessary.

The regulations governing access to records in the Archives are essentially the same as those governing access through the OEP, but at present there is limited access to current digital information through the Archives repository. This is partly because when any records in a series are closed under Freedom of Information restrictions, the entire series is likely to remain closed until all the records in the series can be opened. It is also the result of time lags in accessioning records from government agencies. For this reason, the National Archives portal is used primarily to make digitized historical documents available.

Challenges

Norway’s digital agenda calls for common solutions to digital governance in public administration. In this rapidly changing and increasingly challenging environment, the Archives’ administrative positioning is a crucial factor in its ability to contribute its immense knowledge and experience to aims for preserving and sharing information more efficiently in relation to national goals. At present, the Archives is part of the Ministry of Culture, whereas digital governance is managed by the Ministry of Modernization.

The principal challenge now is to develop and implement new strategies for protecting and preserving public sector digital information, extending access to it, and incorporating interoperability functionality in future versions of Noark. The Archives is considering how these issues can be addressed in the next version of Noark. In the past, the emphasis was on serving the needs of historical researchers. Today these priorities are changing, not only to enable good e-governance but also to ensure continuous historical and cultural record for the future.

As a starting point, the Archives is working to streamline digital records transfers from record creating agencies to the National Archives’ digital repository. At present, transfers are irregular, and there can be a long gap before an actual transfer occurs. This is largely because of the scale of effort and cost involved in extracting and transferring records from record creating systems to the Archives. The result is a large backlog of digital records and databases remain on agency servers, where the ability to protect their integrity and preserve them diminishes with time.

The proposed solution is a data driven architecture to facilitate continuous mandatory data transmission to an intermediate e-Archive and later to a long-term digital repository. This will involve a standardized application programing interface to support and simplify processes for creating, retrieving, logically deleting or transferring records to secure storage. Extensive work has been invested in defining this solution, which has a projected timeframe of 2015 to 2018. Funding is not yet adequate to develop the proposed new framework, but hopefully progress will be more rapid as the as the benefits become clear.

Simplifying and streamlining processes will have many benefits. It should: prevent long delays in bringing records and

data into secure custody reduce the risk of lost records and data and the

high costs involved in extraction and storage in government agencies

achieve a higher degree of data integrity and quality safeguards than are presently possible.

allow immediate quality assurance, feedback, and data security.

enable much greater information sharing than is now possible.

Significantly, the e-Arkive could greatly enhance the OEP. Difi has received funding for a pilot project for a new OEP solution, and the National Archives and the OEP team have been in close contact about collaboration. The e-Archive architecture can be coordinated with a new OEP solution, based on an upgraded Noark core, so that whole documents, as opposed to simply metadata, can be made available automatically. This could greatly reduce the costs of publishing of the documents and greatly enhance openness and management transparency.

Municipal and county governments face similar but more challenging issues. There are few resources for preserving digital records, only a handful of technicians around the country with extraction competence, and very few digital repository facilities. However, innovative work is underway in large municipalities, including Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim as well as the smaller municipality of Kongsberg, including work on making metadata and entire documents available on public websites. There will be real value in collaboration between the state and municipal levels in developing the eArchive.

Sweden is developing a similar solution, which is to be introduced in several major government agencies in 2016, with the aim of achieving cost savings, more efficient public management, and better protection of digital information with legal, administrative, and historical significance. Although the two systems are different, experiences from Sweden will be valuable in developing the Norwegian solution.

Conclusion

Norway’s approach to open government information is achieved through a well-defined and well-integrated framework of controls. Work over the last 30 years on building a framework of laws, functional requirements, and technical systems for making reliable government information available to everyone, has enabled a remarkable degree of openness that affects the quality of citizens’ lives. Consistent application of Noark requirements has made it possible to trace, relate, and compare policies, decisions, actions, and expenditure accurately over long periods of time as a basis for an informed and socially just society.

Norway is in the process of finding a new balance between carefully defined requirements for managing information and the ability to use technology to streamline information management functions. While specific to Norway, the essence of the systems that have been and are being developed could be modified and scaled to existing resources, for example to meet lower resource country requirements and financial constraints, especially as Norway’s systems are all open source. In this way, Norway’s potential contribution to the Open Government process is enormous.

Overall Conclusion

Digital governance and goals for openness offer unparalleled opportunities for global development, but achieving the benefits requires a stable, trustworthy evidence base supported by an effective legal and regulatory framework. Nordic country experience demonstrates that managing digital information as evidence can be achieved through a strategic approach linked to national objectives for using information effectively in the digital environment.