Summary of the Workshop

Key observations and messages for the program of work of the RK and M project The workshop delivered a large amount of information, ideas and visions, and a provided a fruitful forum for multidisciplinary reflection and discussion. Key observations and messages from the workshop are as follows: - The importance of having a common glossary is confirmed. - It is of interest to the project to better understand the contents of the current bibliography on RK and M. - Examples of memory loss and records misuse or misplacement exist both inside and outside the nuclear field. - The relationship between regulation and RK and M preservation for the long-term needs to be better understood. - RK and M preservation or loss and recovery scenarios can be constructed based on a wide range of future human-development hypotheses. - The relationship between RK and M preservation and safeguards needs further clarification. - National archives are a promising venue as one of the multiple approaches for long-term RK and M preservation. - Records management alone will not equip future generations to deal with long-term stores. - It is important to preserve not only technical records, but also records on the history of the program, including its siting within a community (metadata). - The interest in the history of the program should also be looked at from a heritage viewpoint. - Understanding the many ways that clues and records can be left in order that knowledge may be reconstituted by generations beyond those immediately succeeding us is important in this context. - In the same vein, while we must operate on the assumption that the intra-generational transmission chain continues to preserve RK and M, we have also to reach to farther-out generations directly in case the chain is broken. - The aim in reaching out to farther-out generations should be, as far as possible, that of informing them. - The set of data to be kept should be commensurate with the future need for the data and the difficulty of keeping them. - Standardization of messages may be useful when considering records for the farther future - that is, for the time when national programs may no longer be extant. - Operators and regulators would benefit from a clear national or international position on RK and M requirements. Overall there is interest in compiling the international requirements or, more simply, requests, that countries have to fulfil when dealing with post-closure situations