Trusting Records

1 The Evolution of Legal and Historical Methods for Assessing the Trustworthiness of Records.- 1.1 The Roman Era.- 1.2 The Middle Ages.- 1.3 The Renaissance.- 1.4 The Seventeenth Century.- 1.5 Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Developments in Evidence Law.- 1.6 Nineteenth-Century Developments in Historical Method.- 1.7 Conclusion.- 2 Trusting Records as Legal Evidence: Common Law Rules of Evidence.- 2.1 Common law vs. Civil law Procedure.- 2.2 Rules Governing the Admissibility of Documentary Evidence.- 2.3 Admissibility of Electronic Records.- 2.4 The Role of the Adversarial Process in the Legal Assessment of Record Trustworthiness.- 2.5 Conclusion.- 3 Trusting Records as Historical Evidence: Modern Historical Methods.- 3.1 Framework of Modernist Historical Methods.- 3.2 The External and Internal Criticism of a Record.- 3.3 Postmodernist Critiques of Historical Method.- 3.4 Challenges to Historical Method posed by Electronic Records.- 3.5 Conclusion.- 4 Creating and Maintaining Trustworthy Records in Electronic Systems: Archival Diplomatic Methods.- 4.1 Modern Diplomatics.- 4.2 The Application of Diplomatics to the Records of Twentieth-Century Bureaucracies.- 4.3 Contemporary Archival Diplomatics: The University of British Columbia Project.- 4.4 Limits to Ensuring Record Trustworthiness in a Bureaucracy.- 4.5 Conclusion.- Conclusion.- Notes.