Integrity (or admissibility) of electronically scanned documents
13/06/2009
Electronic documents have greater weight of evidence providing their integrity can be proved. BS BIP0008 is the most relevant best industry standard for electronic document integrity.
BSI DISC PD0008 is the current British Standard document relating to 'Legal Admissibility and Evidential Weight of Information Stored Electronically'. It sets a benchmark for procedures that business should follow in order to achieve best practice, and therefore, legal admissibility of their electronic documents.
The issue of Legal Admissibility is at the core of records management for major business or organisations, and in particular government organisations.
An organisation or business needs to be able to prove (to a court of law or some other statutory body) that the contents of a particular document or data file created or existing within an Electronic Document Management System have not changed since the time of storage. There are agreed procedures that can be adhered to for this condition to be met.
If the data file has been scanned (ie it is an electronically stored image of an original paper document), then the organisation must be able to prove that the electronic image is a true representation of the original. Proving the authenticity of electronically stored documents is crucial to their admissibility in a court.
Enterprise level document management systems contain BS BIP0008 Compliance Modules.
Further information on this subject can be ontained from DCS who provide a free whitepaper about the legal admissibility of scanned documents.
