INFORMATION SOCIETY: BUSINESS URGED TO HELP DEVELOP ELECTRONIC ARCHIVES.

If Europe wants to follow the United States example, and several participants have expressed there conviction that it should be done, where the management of the electronic archives life cycle in organised by the Food and Drug Administration, the industrialists have to find and efficient and economical way to archive there electronic information. Up till now it would be hard to learn from the European Industrialists experience and one of the main objectives of the DLM Forum is to gather together the existing skills in this field which taking into account the operational needs, the norms and the future specifications needed.The Forum organiser promised to elaborate, for the management of electronic documents and archives, a model of referencing base on present knowledge and fulfilling certain criteria related to important questions, such as transparency and accessibility to electronic information, the possibilities for long and short-term conservation of authentic archives, the norms and open specifications and the interdisciplinary Directives for the best practices. The participants have the intention of developing this model in close cooperation with the information technology and communications industry (ITC).To this effect the Forum in association with the European Commission and the member states launched special "a DLM message" to industry. So as to protect the information's authenticity and its pertinence in accordance with the norms and quality specifications, the Forum believes that industry must move towards open exchange norms between different software which would allow the transfer of information its degradation. This is particularly important for Europe where information exchange between countries is common and where software has to be able to process different languages and different national contexts of presentation. On this matter the Forum believes it is necessary to establish norms and interdisciplinary Directives for the conservation of archives in both the short and medium term.Further more the Forum asked the DLM...