I could just say a few words about this.
First, it's terribly difficult to establish the impact of freedom of information or open data on records because so many things flow into what makes a record be a certain way or not. Of course there are so many influences. I know there have been a few rather high-profile cases in Canada about the issue of records destruction. We concluded from central government that there was no negative impact on record and there was a slight positive impact, because what it had done was actually professionalize, for example, e-mails and other communications that were perhaps a little bit sloppy when they shouldn't have been.
At local government level, we have actually found a few rather interesting incidents where freedom of information has led to people's recording things in a different way, probably in a more negative way with less information. But these seem to be rather isolated examples. It's not happening systematically, simply because people don't really have the time to think about FOI when they're making records. Officials across local and central government have said “Look, there is a professional code of conduct about this; I must have a record.”
On a more day-to-day level, when we spoke to officials they felt they had to have a record because they would get in more trouble if they didn't have a record than if they did and the record got them into trouble. Really, a lot of them were more concerned about the consequences of not having a record. They did point to codes of conduct, for example, codes of professional ethics. It is extremely difficult to tell.
It's interesting. There may be two effects, one negative in certain cases, but also a slight positive effect in terms of cleaning up sloppy e-mails and sloppy documents that may say unprofessional things in them, for example.