RECORDS, TERMINOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE PANAMA PAPERS
Keywords:
Panama Papers; records management; archival terminology; diplomatics; information metrics; email governance; search engines; data leaksAbstract
The Panama Papers leak of April 2016 exposed 11.5 million internal records of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, covering the period 1977–2015 and totalling 2.6 terabytes. Beyond its political and financial consequences, the leak is a rare, fully documented example of an organisation’s complete record collection being processed, searched and interpreted by outsiders. Building on the case study proposed by Chabin (2017), this article asks what the Panama Papers can teach records management (RM) about terminology, retrieval, information metrics and email governance.
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