|  Since the end of 2015 Spain has a new set of legislation for the public sector that fully affects how documents should be managed. Law 39/2015 of Common Administrative Procedure and Law 40/2015 of the Legal Framework of Public Sector lay the foundations of how to develop e-administration and, therefore, how electronic records in the public sector should be managed.
Overall, I welcome the content of the new legislation in what regards to document management. I think that it comes to settle and clarify the fundamental aspects, while simplifying some other issues that had unnecessarily complicated implementations. This is not to deny that some issues have already sparked some debate and the practical implementation is still pending to be solved.
The big change introduced by this laws is to establish e-administration, and therefore electronic procedure, as the only possible. It's no longer a project of transformation by the leading administrations, but the norm. The exception is now the use of paper, which is relegated to a few isolated cases that should not affect electronic transactions as the norm. This is a breakthrough, as in common parlance it means that governments in Spain shall stop producing paper within the deadlines established by the laws. The possibility of "hybrid cases," an idiom so ugly as complicated and expensive in its practical implementation, is beyond discussion. We shouldn't spend more resources and brain cells defining this practice!
Besides the main change, I had to carefully review this legislation to prepare the course I teach in SEDIC. I have gathered the most important issues in this table.
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ASPECT
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COMMENT
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Register for income documents
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There will no longer be to types of registers: one for paper, with its structure and staff, and other for E-documents, managed by the IT department. There is only one. The organizational transformation of the register offices will be a great change (dateline: Oct. 2018)
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Electronic Registrar: Handling of Paper Documents
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Only citizens (natural persons) have the right to present paper documents if they choose. This measure aims to limit this practice leaving it as a residual situation. Register offices are required to scan the document while they register it and return it to the citizen. Any doubts whether it can be destroyed or not, or on who has to authorize the destruction are ended.
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E-Signatures: Differences between means of signature and means of identification
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From a records management point of view this clarification together with the specification of the different types of e-signatures helps to separate the signature of documents and the means of identification
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Documents to be signed by citizens
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By explaining clearly in what types of documents shall an electronic signature be used : Requests, Responsible statements or Communications, Appeals, Waivers and Refusals; not only do they help by simplifying the use of the signatures, but they also clarify the main document types.
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Administrative Public Documents
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The documents produced by public authorities have to be electronic. These are the ones to be managed, forget all possible paper copies.
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Electronic Cases
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Clearly defined as a grouping of documents, indicating that mandatory reports, a certified copy of the resolution and a numbered index of documents should always be included.
Somehow it moves away from the complexity of the "ENI (National Interoperability Framework) Cases," which seem to only be used when they need to be refered to another administration. The debate is open.
To highlight a curious contradiction, the law states that a record can be in more than one case and at the same time, but for for the resolution it requires a certified copy to be included.
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Metadata
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Although the concept is too technical for a general law, it is used at least three times, referring to the metadata that records and copies should have. Undoubtedly we will have to be supported by subsidiary legislation.
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Single Electronic Archive
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It is one of the concepts that more debate have arisen, especially among archivists who have to make it compatible with an existing legislation based on a paper custodial model (departmental archive, central and historical). I prefer to see it as an advance with technological: a single repository, and organizational consequences: criteria, processes and methods common to all documents and cases.
It circumscribes the electronic archive only to records pertaining to finalised cases. Apart from the question, meanwhile what shall we do with electronic records? It gives rise to different approaches that probably require another post (see post Paco Fernandez in his blog: "El Archivista")
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Conditions of access to electronic archive
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Without establishing it explicitly, the idea of single electronic archive and the conditions to access it seems to carry the same implicit idea that records and cases must be accessible without using processing applications. We can not therefore leave the logic of permissions and access only in the hands of the later.
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