It is intended to apply to electronic documents the principles of records management which have been applied successfully to paper documents. The project will ensure that information technology is exploited to offer the access and functionality required by document authors and users. The form in which the technology is applied must, of course, ensure the integrity and security of the data; it should also be based on standard forms of data storage and exchange.

The project recognises that document owners have the right to and responsibility for the management of their information. Indeed they are the people best placed to do so, and the tools and techniques provided must enable them to perform the tasks effectively. The project therefore has an important "educational" or "awareness-raising" dimension, in terms of both the problem areas and their possible solutions.

The tools and techniques applied to the management of these documents must be "sustainable" in that they must address their long-term disposal and retrieval. They should also be "extensible" in that they must provide, as far as it is possible to do so, a base which can accomodate future developments in the rapidly changing technology of document-based processing. The use of non-proprietary standards, and attention to the principles on which those standards are based, should go some way towards achieving this goal.