Transparency through archives

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The Swiss Federal Archives (SFA) are housed in an imposing building. This is where Swiss history is made in the truest sense of the word. The SFA serves legal certainty and "continuous and rational administrative management". It makes transparency and government action possible in the first place - as it says in a nutshell on Wiki-pedia.

Wikipedia held a residency at the BAR from 2013 to 2014. The theme: 100th anniversary of the First World War. The archive, which is administratively attached to the Federal Department of Home Affairs (FDHA), seems somewhat reticent these days when it comes to "Wikipedia in Residence" projects. Wikimedia Switzerland and Wiki-pedia partners are now meeting with a high level of response at prestigious locations such as the British Library in London and the Metropolitan in New York. The goal of Wikimedia Commons, the central office for free media files, is to continue the open-source idea by publishing as much archive material as possible from voluntary institutions and authors.

Summarising and digitising encyclopaedias - what better way to do this than via Wikipedia? Why don't our colleagues in Switzerland show any interest in greater synergies? The Swiss Federal Archives have undoubtedly been opening up the federal archival collections to certain groups since time immemorial.

Valuable information
The Federal Archives offer digital archiving to cantons, municipalities and other institutions. The Federal Council has authorised it to do so with a performance mandate in accordance with Art. 18 of the Federal Act on Archiving (BGA, SR 152.1). However, this only happened recently - in May 2014. The public authorities want to counteract "their own cost-intensive developments" and at the same time ensure "economic operation".

Broadly speaking, the Federal Archives contain around 60,000 linear metres of analogue documents and over 15 terabytes (editor's note: 1 TB of storage corresponds to 2000 hours of CD recordings) of digitised documents. Because the computing power of chips doubles every 18 months - to use Moore's Law for short - the Swiss Confederation is faced with major IT challenges. Especially because the mobile society sends millions of data every day.

For this reason, the SFA's archive content is now to be processed and synchronised in digital form with the Confederation's business administration system (GEVER).

Holdings that are in particular demand are now increasingly being digitised at Archivstrasse 24 in Bern and made available online.

The documents from the Federal Archives are already "valuable assets" today. The information, which originates from centuries-old databases and administrative systems, must ensure "originality", "integrity" and long-term usability of the data (see info box) according to the performance mandate. - However, in order to guarantee state action, the SFA must be able to maintain an interpretative sovereignty over private institutions.

Open Government Data
A typical archiving process from the SFA ranges from pre-archival advice to the mediation of documents, for example by means of copies of old maps or extracts of dormant assets. Such a process always includes organisational as well as technical aspects.

"In digital archiving, contextual information (Meta-data) are important. These are decoupled from their specific IT environments during the transfer (Database and operating systems), separated from applications and the actual hardware, for example, and stored in formats suitable for archiving," explains a SFA communications officer. "If it is necessary to maintain readability, they are also converted into new formats (migration process).

In collaboration with other institutions, the Federal Archives develop solutions for archiving special data, such as geodata or websites. However, the Confederation is also particularly concerned with its own open data publications, for example on the pilot portal opendata.admin.ch. Here, Swiss citizens can download official data free of charge.

In particular, data from the map services of the Federal Office for the Environment and the Federal Office of Public Health are new. At the same time as the pilot portal continues to operate, an Open Government Data Strategy Switzerland is being developed under the leadership of the Federal IT Steering Committee.

Right to own copy
In this context, the "right to copy" plays a not insignificant role in the self-determination of Swiss citizens.

Legal requirements: Art. 13 BV (protection of privacy)

1) Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence, post and telecommunications.

2) Every person is entitled to protection from misuse of their personal data.

Art. 107a BV (use of personal, digital data)

1) The Confederation shall issue regulations on the use of personal data obtained from the use of digital networks by private individuals.

2) The use of this data is considered to be all activities in which personal data are collected, stored or further used for the purpose of creating an economic, scientific or ideal added value.

Problem Statement: Per se, there should be no "data collection" of personal data in the Confederation. The direction of protection (of Art. 13 para. 2 BV) via a claim against the state (not against private individuals) is still open. Data use by com-mercial providers is currently not an "offence". (Source: Association Data & Health Zurich)

Digitisation of legal work
Baloise Insurance has been making the world safer for more than 150 years. The Baloise Group, headquartered in Basel, operates as an insurer and pension provider. At the Baloise Group's corporate legal service, all legal content was recently unified through search technologies. The Baloise Legal and Tax department has been using the "Lawsearch Enterprise" search engine since spring 2017. Lawyers and tax specialists can use it to find all the information they need: "Weblaw's business software can be adapted perfectly to our customers' requirements," says Andreas Burki, Head of Legal and Tax.

Internal documents and dossiers as well as legal texts and court decisions can now be coordinated via a dossier management system (CRM and ERP system) called Vertec. The Legal and Taxes Department uses the latest version 3 of the search engine. This version includes a facetted search with graphical filters and personalised search functionalities. It links all internal data sources (via the Windows repository, sample documents, e-mails, etc.) and can also search the most important legal documents from the Internet (e.g. federal and cantonal laws and court decisions).

Of course," says Christoph Gee ring, a project manager in the Digital Transformation department @Baloise, "we can limit the search engine to a clearly regulated group of people." Baloise, also a provider of insurance against cyber damage, controls its digital archive and generally its IT infrastructure by separating it into sub-areas - and finally also by means of stored digital logs (via user recognition).

However, the project manager also believes that a number of relaunches with defined roles still need to be carried out before end-to-end "transparency in the analytical gearbox" (via IoT cluster analyses) will be possible at Baloise.

"Single Point of Search"
"Single point of search" instead of bookshelves is now the motto: the lawyers and tax specialists at Basler Versicherung AG benefit from advanced digitization. A single SPoS reference point for all information speeds up efficiency and makes daily work easier. Geering, the Baloise project manager, is positive about the networked future:

"Employees are freed from frustrating comparisons and can concentrate on their actual tasks." The new search engine increases collaboration considerably. Certainly, some data would still have to be restructured, but ultimately everyone would have easier access - keyword: "self-service" - to important archives.