[LINK] Preservation of Data

[Tom Worthington]

At 02:53 PM 5/04/2007, Markus Buchhorn wrote:
>At 10:49 AM 5/04/2007, Tom Worthington wrote:
>>... Researchers at government organisations need to keep in mind 
>>that unauthorized deletion of data is not just unfortunate: it is a crime.
>
>If you actually get into those laws (state, territory and federal, 
>depending on the organisation) you'll quickly find that it's not at 
>all clear that research data is a record in the legal sense. ...

A court would need to decide if specific data was a "record". But it 
would seem reasonable that if it is worth paying a government 
employee to research something, then their data is worth keeping. At 
the very least, their research data is evidence they actually did some work.

As an example, government money is used to track bushfires across 
Australia, via satellite 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/emergency/sentinel/index.shtml>. 
Those running the system clearly have an obligation to keep the data. 
A court investigating deaths in a bushfire is likely to take a dim 
view of a researcher who says: "we were running out of disk space so 
I deleted the old records".



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
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