Hong Kong government should keep pace with global standards in archiving online content: audit watchdog
- Audit Commission criticises six-year delay in the implementation of a long-term electronic historical record that will be publicly available
- Director of Administration Wing says archiving is technically complex and costly, and foreign governments have scaled back
Hong Kong’s government departments should keep pace with global standards in the archiving of online content, the audit watchdog has warned, criticising a six-year delay in the implementation of a strategy.
In the latest report by the Audit Commission, it noted that at present government agencies were not required to keep records of their websites and social media accounts on a publicly available database.
“As Hong Kong is lagging behind other overseas jurisdictions ... there is a need to formulate a long-term strategy for web archiving in the government,” the report, published on Wednesday, stated.
The commission said Britain, Singapore and the United States already had centralised web archives accessible to the public and set up between 2003 and 2008, while Australia established theirs in 2011.
Hong Kong does not have an archive law in place, but the current administration has agreed to work on a legislation, which will impose a legal duty on departments to keep public records. The Law Reform Commission is still studying proposals.
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Under current guidelines, all 75 government bureaus and departments are supposed to implement an electronic record-keeping system before the end of 2025.
But the watchdog criticised the government’s administrative wings and the subsidiary Government Records Service (GRS) for delay and oversight in pushing for an electronic database.
A study on long-term electronic record filing was first launched in 2011 and expected to be completed in December 2014. However, this is still under way, with a new deadline by May 2021, meaning a six-year delay.
Some departments also failed to archive correspondence promptly, according to the watchdog. More than 7,700, or 22 per cent of emails by the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) in 2019, for instance, took more than three months to be archived. Some 44 per cent of the content took more than a year to be filed.
The director of the government’s Administration Wing, Esther Leung Yuet-yin, said departments would be reminded to archive records within 30 days, or in three months in exceptional cases.
But on web archiving, Leung noted that foreign administrations had substantially scaled back such work due to significant costs. She said archiving was “technically complex”and involved long-term investments, and the GRS would carefully study the issue before coming up with a strategy.
Former GRS director Simon Chu Fook-keung agreed that published online material should be maintained.
“All these records should be kept, especially when the government is using websites and social media more, as well as making announcements there,” Chu said. He added that the British National Archives also automatically filed selected government digital records.
But to fundamentally address the red tape and delay, Chu said an archives law was needed to hold officials accountable.
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