Paradata in Emergency Services Communications Systems

Government provides a variety of critical services, often grounded in decades-old technology. As these services evolve to encompass newer technologies and offer broader capabilities, their exposure to potential threats increases the importance of modeling and simulation to understand their operation and vulnerabilities. This modeling activity requires access to records collected by government agencies, conceptualized formally in terms of archival science. However, the archival science concept of paradata is insufficient to support the forensic reconstruction of the real world required by a modeling effort. This chapter outlines how iterative, interdisciplinary work to model and simulate emergency services communication systems illuminates the need for a new role for paradata in government archives.