IT and the Information Superhighway are subjects which most people are familiar with.

However, much of what we hear deals solely with the technology and what this allows us to do.

We are told about the huge mass of information we can access, how quickly we can find it, how fast we can transmit it, and how easily we can manipulate it.

I have just read something which made me think about all this in a new light. I was looking for something else when I found, on the Lord Chancellor's Department website, the text of a speech by Geoff Hoon MP on the subject of e-mail messages and archives.

The context of the speech was the preservation of material in the Public Record Office, and the challenges the PRO faces in collecting and storing electronic documents.

However, it struck me that the same challenges will face every company that uses e-mail where once paper was king. The challenges include ensuring the stored records do not become corrupted.

The technology needs to be available to read them in the future.

How many companies, for example, lost access to material because the archive copy was held on a 51/4-inch disk no longer readable by today's word processors?

Another issue is that of actually storing an e-message. We file letters and other paper copies; relevant e-mail needs a similar procedure. The test of the speech says "we must ensure electronic documents are treated with the same seriousness as paper ones, and not simply erased."

Indeed, we have already seen this approach in the context of electronic libel; and it has been established that copyright of electronic documents exist as for hard copy documents.

If electronic commerce, e-mail and the rest are to become commonplace, then companies using them need to ensure that they pay just as much attention to the message as they do to the medium.

Paul Twiddy is information manager at Business Link Bradford & District

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.