This Partnership brings together universities, government agencies, archival institutions and industry from five continents. For interventions into public records to be successful, there must be communication across boundaries: disciplinary, sectoral, and geographic.
One of the purposes of this Partnership is to establish mutual understanding between the archival and artificial intelligence (AI) communities in order to support ongoing cooperation and knowledge creation, and to unite academic, professional, and industry Partners in both areas of knowledge.
Because public records are instrumental in governance, evidence, and culture, several disciplines are directly invested in assuring their availability, accessibility, and trustworthiness, including computer science, cybersecurity, digital forensics, information science, history, heritage preservation, and ethics. Though anchored in the archival field, this Partnership brings together organizations across these areas of endeavour.
In addition to being multidisciplinary, this Partnership is of necessity international. Public records are an expression of sovereignty. Public records that are not secure and trustworthy are a threat to the rights of the citizenry: consider for example voting records. Solutions developed for public records, then, must be of an internationally acceptable standard in terms of methods, tools and processes, from cybersecurity to long-term preservation. The requirement for international cooperation also derives from the fact that AI is trans-jurisdictional and global.
Finally, because knowledge mobilization across records and archival communities, as well as the AI and general information technology community, is a critical, embedded part of the research itself, the Partnership integrates organizations from a variety of contexts, ensuring that the solutions developed are viable in the face of challenges such as resource constraints.
