"Capture" Responses
Summary
The AAOLIST Administrator, Suzanne Dubeau, asked me to post to
the list a summary of the responses I received regarding my
"capture" query posted to the AAOLIST and arcan_l, Sep
5/01. One of the responses was only posted to arcan_l.
Others were sent offlist to me directly. I have received
permission from those who sent info to me offlist to provide it
onlist. Thanks to the following people who provided feedback (in
alphabetical order): Rick Barry, Bill Benedon, Wendy Duff, John
Roberts and Jim Suderman. Below I have summarized the responses
to the best of my ability. I hope I have managed to convey what
was intended. For the full comments of the people who posted
onlist, I suggest you go to the AAOLIST and arcan_l archives.
1. Definition I
found on the Webopedia tech glossary website, Aug 30, 2001.
http://webopedia.lycos.com/TERM/c/capture.html:
To save a particular state of a program. The term capture
often refers to saving the information currently displayed on a
display screen. You can capture the screen to a printer or to a
file. The act of saving a display screen is called a screen
capture. Video capture refers to storing video images in a
computer.
The term capture is also used to describe the recording of
keystrokes during the definition of a macro.
2. Barry, Rick.
Summary of response provided in his Sep 5/01 post to AAOLIST and
arcan_l:
The term capture has been around in the IT world for sometime and
is more recently a feature in the ARM literature. My SAA2001 IU
presentation, the Pittsburgh Functional Requirements, deals with
captured records [see email below from Wendy Duff as well for more
info on the Pittsburgh Project]. The Pitt FRs used the term
"CAPTURED RECORDS" and not "CAPTURE RECORDS".
What is tricky is not just capturing to a file or printer but
capturing or porting the file (which by our definition must include
the necessary metadata) into a trustworthy recordkeeping environment.
Once it is in that environment, the preservation aspects should
already have been addressed.
Many email records are not worth retaining, but we need to have a
system in place to ensure that those emails worthy of retention are
first identified and separated from others on the fly or tagged as
such; then they have to have attached to them all the necessary
metadata, at least temporarily and then together they have to be
picked up out of the email system and carefully deposited into
whatever the trustworthy recordkeeping environment is. At that
stage, the metadata is either embedded in or bound to the record.
That whole process is what I believe capture is about.
As technology gets better and the transactions more interactive,
people are worrying about how to capture web records on the fly before
they disappear. There are basically two ways to do it. One
is to capture and port the records produced in these systems to a
serious records management application. Two is to change the
recordkeeping system to make it become a serious recordkeeping
system. In most organizations a combination of these approaches
may be best.
3. Benedon, Bill.
Email to me directly sent Sep 9/01:
AS 4390 Australian
Standard - Records Management
Capture - a deliberate action which results in
the registration of a record
into a recordkeeping system. For certain business activities, this
action may
be designed into electronic systems so that the capture of records
is
concurrent with the creation of records.
ISO15489-1 Records Management
The purpose of capturing records into records systems is to
* establish a relationship between the record, the creator
and the business
context that originated it,
* place the record and its relationship within a records
system, and
* link it to other records.
ISO 15489-2 Technical Report
Capture is the process of determining that a record should be made and
kept.
This includes both records created and received by the organization.
It
involves deciding which documents are captured,
which in turn implies
decisions about who may have access to those documents and generally
how long
they are to be retained.
4. Duff, Wendy.
Ensuring the Preservation of Reliable Evidence: A Research
Project Funded by NHPRC. Archivaria. 42. Fall 1996.
Summary of comments on this article provided by Wendy Duff in her
email to me Sep 5/01.
This article deals with the Pittsburgh Project. It grouped
the functional requirements for electronic recordkeeping into a number
of categories, one being capture. The idea was that the records
professional had to be active in ensuring records were captured
because many are not--they appear on the screen, but are not saved to
permanent storage. The category capture was made up of a number
of requirements including: comprehensive, identifiable,
complete, accurate, understandable, meaningful and authorized.
5. Roberts, John,
sent to arcan_l, Sep 6/01. Provided the Australian definition as
given by Mr Benedon above.
6. Suderman, Jim.
Sent to AAOLIST and arcan_l Sep 5/01.
I would add to the aspects of "capture" that you
indicate [see #1 Webopedia definition] the notion of including the
addition of metadata that gives the record its context. See especially
the recently posted InterPARES report on Preservation
(www.interpares.org) "How To Preserve Authentic Electronic
Records" from which the following quotation is taken:
"It [examining electronic records] serves four purposes: to
determine
whether the archives will preserve the records, to identify
preservation
strategies to be used, to determine when preservation interventions
should
occur, and to identify, produce and capture information necessary to
assert
the authenticity of the records."(p. 30)