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.
Under current guidelines, all 75 government bureaus and departments are supposed to implement an electronic record-keeping system before the end of 2025.
