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European Union conference

Document Lifecycle Management Forum Conference Budapest 2005

The National Archives contributed to the fourth multidisciplinary European Document Lifecycle Management (DLM) Forum Conference on Electronic Records Supporting e-Government and Digital Archives which took place in Budapest on 5 –7 October 2005.

From the results and feedback, the conference can be judged a great success; which is just as well as the next one will be way off in 2008!

It was hosted by the Hungarian Government and there were 350 conference participants from 34 countries. From within the European Union there was a gratifyingly strong participation from the newly accessioned East European countries.

Lively keynote presenters spoke from a number of viewpoints coming from the Hungarian Archives, the European Commission, The National Archives (CEO Sarah Tyacke, as outgoing Chair of the DLM Forum), the Australian National Archives and an information management market analyst. Several staff from The National Archives presented in later sessions.

Now that electronic documents and records are widely used, the conference addressed the issues that come to the fore: information governance in the e-government policy and information legislation environment, standards and case studies on interchange and preservation of digital information as evidence and historical records, and the challenges for records management and of cultural change.

This included the management of electronic records and the top priority of the DLM Forum's projects, MoReq (Model requirements for the management of electronic records).

The original MoReq was published by the European Commission in 2002 and by agreement with the EC, a DLM Forum working group has produced a scoping report for a new version, MoReq2.

MoReq2 is intended to update and extend the functional requirements to meet the latest best practice and also to extend into testing the compliance of software products against the requirements.

In a wider sense it will aim to support activities in every country of the EU to improve the completeness and quality of electronic records.

The original MoReq has gained widespread acceptance and use. However , national approaches though mostly compatible or based on MoReq, predominate. MoReq2 will provide a convergence point for these national programmes.

The DLM Forum members endorsed the Scoping Report on MoReq2 clearing the way for the European Commission to take its development forward.

The conference presentations and the Scoping Report on MoReq2 can be found at: http://europa.eu.int/comm/secretariat_general/edoc_management/dlm_forum/index_en.htm.

The original MoReq published in 2002 can be found at: http://europa.eu.int/idabc/en/document/2631/5585.