T 2.74 Inadequate indexing keys for archives

Electronic archives may contain very large amounts of data. Indexing keys are used for storing and finding individual sets of data, whereby these must be differentiated in indexing data of the document management system (DMS) and indexing data of the archive system.

Indexing keys of the DMS serve for managing the context and tables of contents together with the respective document. Selecting indexing keys inappropriately at this point would result in archived documents not or being searchable or only being searchable with great effort or the semantics of archived documents not being discernible unambiguously. On the other hand, a large number of context criteria increases the administrative effort and reduces the performance of the document management system in proportion to the increase of the number of archived documents.

Indexing keys of the archive system, however, are of a rather technical nature. They serve for identifying individual raw data and organising the storage of the raw data to data media. Their selection normally does not depend on the DMS, but on the structure of the archive server and the underlying memory architecture. An essential requirement includes the unambiguousness of document identification. If this requirement is not complied with, i.e. if two documents are assigned the same document identification, the DMS may be provided with an incorrect document which is then assigned a new document context during retrieval depending on the search method. The document not found would be present from a physical point of view, but it would no longer be possible to unambiguously assign the document to a process in the DMS.

The auditing acceptability of the archiving process essentially refers to the unambiguous identification of all managed documents, as well as to the non-repudiation of the link between document and context information.