Introduction

There are very few people working in information rights law who intended to do so. Most people managing requests for information under data protection or freedom of information started in another discipline like records management, information management, archives or as librarians and then transferred over or had information rights added to their duties. Some of the principles are the same. Records management and data protection both require that data is destroyed when it is no longer required. Librarians and archivists are used to helping people to find the information they need from within their collections. I came myself from a records management background.

However, the various pieces of legislation covering information rights have specific legal requirements relating to the information that an organization holds. If you find yourself managing information rights requests you need to be aware of what is in the legislation. There are courses, including master's degrees, available in this area. For example, I received the LLM Information Rights Law at University of Northumbria. However, not everyone has the time or funds to study at that level, but you still need to know how to apply the law.

That's what this book is for. It is intended to help records managers, information managers, archivists and librarians who find themselves with responsibility for managing information rights in their organizations. As such, it goes through the big three – Data Protection, Freedom of Information and the Environmental Information Regu - lations – as well as the other legislation in this area that covers how you should respond to requests for information. Not all of this will apply to everyone; for example, access to health records is unlikely to be used by organizations that do not hold health records, but the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations apply wherever marketing takes place. If you are acting as your organization's expert in this area, this book will point to most if not all of the legislation that you need to know about, going into detail about the UK-based legislation in this area.

The focus of the book is on UK-based legislation. This includes the specific Scottish legislation relating to freedom of information and environmental information. However, the data protection advice is based on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).