“One system to rule them all”

Abstract

Digital information has been a challenge to life cycle management. It does not always conform to traditional conceptions of records and is often stored in information systems that have not been designed for records and archives management. In 2008 the National Archives of Finland introduced a new vision to solve this problem. The ambition was to create, in the spirit of the record-keeping continuum, organisational information control systems that would provide metadata across organisations and allow for management of records processes via application programming interfaces. The result was SÄHKE1 (2005) and SÄHKE2 (2008). This idea has some similarity to the Australian Clever Recordkeeping Metadata proposal developed by Evans et al. but was arrived at independently and differs substantially from it in some respects. Although the Finnish information control system concept was never consistently implemented, it is of interest to the future of digital archiving to discuss the vision behind the proposal, its limited successes, and the difficulties it encountered.