An appraisal of AS4390

      Benefits from the Australian RM standard for a document handling consultant

       

       

      by Michael Steemson

       

      Abstract

      What difference has the Australian Records Management Standard AS4390 made to recordkeeping consultancy and recordkeepers?  The Caldeson Consultancy Principal Michael Steemson tells a Stockholm, Sweden, archives and records management conference in November, 2000, that the benefits have been huge.  The ground-breaking standard has valuable applications to suit every national environment. The work undertaken in New Zealand to create a local guide to the Standard is an example. The conference was organised by Arkivrådet AAS (the Swedish Association of Archivists and Records Managers) and the national Swedish General Standards Institure (STG) committee for Documentation.

       

       

      Once upon a time, I went to a conference of the New Zealand Computer Society to see what the information technologists were talking about.  I’m a firm believer in seeing how the other half lives. It was quite disturbing.

       

      They spoke little about information technology.  In fact, the subject was hardly ever referred to.  What concerned them was information management and exploitation.  Worst of all, these captains of the IT industry were in no doubt that they were the information managers … and they made no differentiation between information and records.

       

      If they thought of it at all, they still thought of records management as just another name for filing.  But I digress, already.  I’m not going to spend time bemoaning the unhappy lot of archives and records managers the world over, if we let it happen.  That’s another story.

       

      The computer society conference was interesting for many reasons, not least of all because, during one of the lunch breaks, I met the IT manager of a company with a big dollar turnover.  He actually approached me, asking: “Are you a consultant in business information management?”

       

      I assured him that I am and he said: “Never expected to meet someone like you here!  What a bit of luck!  We’ve got an enormous problem with our business records.”  And he went on to tell me how the company had formerly been a government agency and had been privatised, how its recordkeeping had been good until a couple of years ago when a company re-organisation and “financial re-alignment”, as he called it, had put an end to that.

       

      He was so glad to meet me.  Did I have a card?  Could I help his company, did I think?

       

      Well, of course I said I could.  Just what I’m here for, I said.  What efforts had the company already made to put things right, I asked? 

       

      His close attention to my responses was most flattering.  I became expansive. 

       

      Wrong!  Bad move!  Silly me! 

      I blame the orange juice

      I blame the delicious chicken risotto we were served  …  and the orange juice.  Never trusted orange juice.  Dulls the senses.  Now, if we’d been given a glass of good, New Zealand chardonnay to go with the chicken I’d have been alert to my danger.  But, no … orange juice!  I blundered on:

       

      There’s a huge amount of guidance available out there, I said knowingly; things like the Australian Records Management Standard, AS4390.  Had he heard of that, I asked? 

       

      My lunchtime friend reacted most pleasingly to such news.  No, he’d not heard of it, but how interesting!  I went on, blissfully digging my way out of a job. 

       

      I expect you are ahead of me.  Did I ever hear a single word from my acquaintance after the event?  No, of course I did not! 

       

      I had given the game away entirely.  Without charging him a cent, I had told him how to buy a $500-a-day consultancy for a one-off $100, the New Zealand price for AS4390.  That is about 400 kronor, give or take the vagaries of the currency market at the moment.  What a bargain!

       

      Well, my excuse really is that I was at that time deep into the early stages of developing a New Zealand Guide to Records Management and AS4390, a document I describe below.  It is aimed at helping Kiwi recordkeepers apply the Australian work to their environment, so the Standard was very much in my mind as I spoke to the IT boss.

       

      A recurring nightmare for me now is to wonder how many times I did this before I realised why I was getting no work.  I wonder if any of those clients I lost ever said a little, private thank you to “that silly man”  … me!

       

      In fact, of course, it really is all good news.  The Australian Record Management Standard AS4390 has been and will be for some time yet, a “bible” for the English-speaking records world outside of North America, and even there it’s being used as a basis for a number of significant recordkeeping studies. 

       

      And it’s made a big difference to the way consultants like me can approach their clients.  It’s given us a surety, a back-up for our recommendations, a strong authority beyond ourselves.  That’s true in Australia and in my new country, New Zealand, where I’ve lived for the past four years, coincidentally almost since AS4390 was published.

       

      Karita Thomé

        Karita Thomé
      Anki Steen

        Anki Steen

      Just what difference has the Australian standard made to me as a New Zealand consultant, to New Zealand clients and to the New Zealand business community?  The conference organisers, Anki Steen, the head of Swedish Civil Aviation Administration (Luftfartsverket) Group Archives and Records, and Karita Thomé, Project Manager with the Swedish General Standards Institute (STG), asked three questions when they invited me to address this “benefits” topic for the seminar:

       

      "Have you changed your ways because of the standard?” they asked.

       

      "Have clients changed their demands?" 

       

      "Has it changed the way managers think about Records Management?"

       

      Answers:  Yes, Yes and No!  But to that “no” I would add “not yet!”

       

      Another question:  “Could these benefits apply in Sweden?”  Answer again, yes.  We have a lot in common, us Kiwis and Swedes, more than just because our countries are monarchies.

       

      A final question:  “How could we apply AS4390 in Sweden?”  You are better qualified to answer that than me, but I can tell you how we are doing it in New Zealand.

       

      Have I changed my ways because of the standard?  Certainly!  I’ve already let you into one of the secrets.  I don’t, any more, give the game away before settling the dollars! 

      Standard has made a difference

      Yes, AS4390 certainly has changed dealings with clients.  Previously, when starting an organisation from scratch on a systematic recordkeeping regime, one had sometimes to establish the very basic recordkeeping principles.  What was the purpose of the organisation?  Which records did it want to keep, which could be discarded, and why? 

       

      What about the rules and regulations?  Did they know the legal and regulatory requirements for taxation, for instance, human resources, health and safety, freedom of information, privacy, data protection  ...  on and on and on. 

       

      I once met a prickly, senior New Zealand businessman who, after listening to and answering many detailed questions for what seemed like hours, lost his patience and stormed out of the office shouting: “You’re as bad as my wife!”  I imagine he felt threatened. 

       

      He never explained his outburst.  He apologised but was never very friendly.

       

      The next stage, in those pre-AS4390 days, was to offer suggestions for an orderly development of good records management practice.  But, of course, with that came more questions: 

       

      • “Why must we do this?”


      • “It seems very complicated and time wasting.  Do I need to do this?”


      • “We’ve never bothered with this sort of thing before!”


      • “They didn’t do this at the last place I worked!”  To this one, you have to bite your tongue to stop yourself saying something cutting like “That’s obvious!”

       

      Better, instead, was a small, understanding laugh and a murmured “That’s why we’re going though this, now, isn’t it!”  One had to, however, resist the temptation to add an encouraging endearment like the friendly Kiwi “mate” or the soothing “dear”!  That really would have sounded like a wife!

       

      Consultancy Day Two (or Three in the case of the impatient client  …  he forgot almost everything in his temper) would be taken up with these “how do’s” … how do we do this and how do we do that.  They were not the hard parts.  Again, it was the “why’s” that were the real difficulty. 

       

      • “Why must we keep that for seven years?”


      • “We never keep telephone calls, why bother with email?”


      • “I know what we do, so why do we need to analyse the business?”


      • And from senior managers: “Ulla-Bella does the filing.  Why do I need to know all this?”

       

      Behind it all was the usually unspoken but almost tangible challenge:  “How do I know this is going to work?”  Pre-AS4390, your only response was on the lines of a feeble “It will.  Trust me!”  Sometime that trust wore a little thin.

      The Advent of AS4390

      So you can see why, when I first heard of the advent of the Australian standard, I was delighted, amazed and inspired to spread the word.  That was back in 1995.  At that time I was living in London and was a member of two committees of the British Standards Institution.  One of them had produced BS7768: 1994, Management of optical disks (WORM) systems for the recording of documents that may be required as evidence.  It reads rather quaintly now, but at the time it was cutting edge standard making.

       

      The other committee, which I chaired, was putting the finishing touches to the BSI’s PD 0008(1), a code of practice for the legal admissibility of information stored electronically.  Both were break-thorough works, providing welcomed relief to records managers fearful of the legal uncertainties of electronic archiving.  Useful as they were, their creation was largely driven by the information technology industry anxious to remove what it saw as serious barriers to greater sales.  It were right, of course.

       

      There was not the same drive behind the need for a records management standard in Britain at that time.  Even after I got someone in Canberra to email me a copy of the draft Australian standard I could not get anyone at BSI to take an interest in writing a British version. 

       

      As far as I can discover, no-one ever did.  The countrymen of my birth have never been good at taking advice from the colonies  ...  as they see them!  Now the BSI is waiting for the international standard that, as you know, is based on the Australian work.  Once ISO15489 and its Technical Report are published, hopefully next year, the Institution will adopt them as the British standard.

       

      None of which matters much.  The Australian Standard has become, by default, a world property.  Record managers all over the globe have been data mining its voluminous, instructive pages.  For the first time, they have the experts of a whole nation saying, “this is what we have to do and this is how we do it”.

       

      Publication of AS4390 was a seminal moment in recordkeeping consultancy.  Now, we had an answer to that dreadful question: ““How do I know this is gong to work?”  Now we could show the doubters statements like the opening paragraph of AS4390’s Part 3: Strategies:

       

      “This standard covers strategies that should be adopted by organisations to ensure that adequate evidence of business activities, to meet the needs and protect the interests of the organisation, its clients and other people affected by its actions and decisions, are made as records and that those records are captured into recordkeeping systems.”

       

      It is 53-word sentence, complex and rather clumsy but it says it all.

       

      Armed with a tool like this, your average recordkeeping consultant goes confidently into battle with the disbelievers.  

       

      “How do I go about it?” clients ask.  Here’s a model implementation plan, you can say.  Part 3, page 18.  See A2.3 paragraph (b)  “Analyse and map business activity”.  It is followed immediately by the next step “Identify requirements for evidence and recordkeeping”. 

       

      “Okay,” say the disbelievers, perhaps a little more convinced.  “But, where do we start?”  At the beginning, you say.  Sub-section A2.1 Phase 1: Preparation paragraph (a) “Define the scope, objectives and limits of the project”. 

       

      And so you can go on.  This is not just you telling the disbelievers … this is the concentrated, condensed expertise of the best Australian recordkeeping brains telling them.  And let me tell you that they don’t come much better than that.

       

      That’s the difference AS4390 has made to me as a records management consultant.  I can show clients its thoughtful approach, its logical and sensible explanations and its examples.  It Is a text book, a reference and a guide.  Best of all, I have it as a back-up to my explanations of good practice.

       

      One more question from your disbelievers: ”Why should I take notice of what the Australians say?“  That’s a good question but there’s a good answer, too.  I will give you the answer in a moment or two.

       

      Next: Has AS4390 caused clients to change their demands?  Yes, it has.  It has given them confidence that a very large group of knowledgeable recordkeepers have studied their problems and come up with answers.  Introduced to them at an early stage, it brings warm, fuzzy feelings of contentment and good will, particularly towards those clever Australians.

       

      Lately, I’ve realised what a public relations coup that was for the Aussies.  In one bound, they joined the North Americans as world leaders in records management principles and application  … surpassed them, perhaps. 

       

      Now, a recordkeeping client can see that what one is saying is accepted good practice and AS4390 has certainly changed the way records managers feel about their jobs and themselves.  It gives them something with which to impress their superiors, something to wave under their bosses’ noses and say, “we need some of this”.

       

      As a result of this feel-good factor, clients are asking more searching questions, particularly about electronic records.  Although 90 per cent of their time is still spent dealing largely with paper, clients are gaining the confidence to look to the future and to consider, calmly, the terrors of email management, on-line archiving, e-Commerce and electronic security.

      That “e” no longer terrifies

      This is a stunning change.  I still remember, vividly, a seminar of the Records Management Society of Great Britain in 1995, only six months before AS4390 was published, where a member spoke about managing email.  Most of the delegates had, at that time, rarely used the Internet but they knew how information proliferates on it. 

       

      The speaker, Jean Samuels, a research and development information analyst with the Pfizer pharmaceutical group, told us: “Control of email is a records management job.  The implications of emails without controls are appalling.”

       

      The audience was aghast.  The faces showed it.  You could feel the incredulity.  Control emails!  But they’re just textual telephone calls, aren’t they?  How can you control those?

       

      It’s hard to believe now that a room full of records managers could be so shocked by such news, just five years ago!  If you like, just AS4390 ago!  Now, of course, recordkeepers take such processes as a matter of course.  It is still a problem, but we know it has to be solved and accept it is one of the jobs we have got to do.

       

      There is the difference!  Now, clients quickly appreciate the basic tenets of records management set out in the Australian standard, and they move on.  Now, even though they still deal largely with hard-copy, they want to know more about these electronic problems and developments.

       

      In fact, AS4390 is not very good at explaining these.  True, the scoping notes in Part 3: Strategies that I just quoted, say:

       

      “This Standard covers the making of records in all forms, including records that are to be captured and maintained in electronic form.”

       

      Did you notice the omission?  No mention of record creation in electronic form.  No e-originals, no e-mail!  It is not surprising.  Remember that the document was written in 1994 and 1995, the same period as my English fellow records managers were being frightened by threats of electronic Armageddon.  Even amongst wiser, academic minds, the thrust of electronic thinking was still imaging and textual storage media.

       

      Don’t get me wrong.  AS4390 doesn’t ignore or overlook electronics.  For instance, Part 3: Strategies deals with the big “E” in Sub-section 8.4 Electronic Recordkeeping Systems.  Here it emphasises that an email message is a record and that e-records should be captured with “relevant structural and contextual information”.  Nowadays, we would simply say “metadata”, but back in 1995, that word was not widely understood.

       

      This does not trouble client records managers today.  As I said, they still deal largely with paper and AS4390 gives them the help they need in that realm.  Clients are no longer frightened of those “e” prefixes.  Now, they are eager to learn about the new electronic juggernauts on the Information Superhighway, new Internet wizardry like extensible mark-up language (XML), like radio frequency identification (RFID) for document tracking and other modern wonders.

       

      To keep up to date, I spend time browsing the Web and watching the work of fellow consultants like my Washington, D.C., friend, Rick Barry, who displays his work on his company website at http://www.mybestdocs.com/.  He’s another of the secrets I don’t tell clients about until they’ve signed up.  He’s a dangerous man for a lowly Kiwi consultant.  He knows and tells it all  … on-line!

      Executives begin to change minds

      In what way, if any, has the Australian standard changed the way executives think about Records Management?  The quick answer is “not much”.  But that overlooks the signs of change that are all about us.

       

      My experience with the New Zealand IT chief who approached me at that computer society conference was an example.  Executives are beginning to see recordkeeping as a specialised task, some of them grudgingly.  But the sheer size and speed of growth of the Internet is forcing them to manage their information more carefully and strategically. 

       

      They are realising that information is indeed the Fourth Resource in business after the Product, Capital and Human resources.  I, personally, would put it first, but that is just like the old argument in the Navy about who is most important, the navigators who guide the ship to the target, the engineers who drive it there or the gunners who aim the weapons.  It is unanswerable, really!

       

      Governments are increasingly concerned about management of the information that floods their websites and chokes their Internet and Intranet systems.  The phrase “e-Government” is increasingly heard in the corridors of power, though I suspect a large proportion of the politicians who use it have little idea what it means or much notion of its potential uses and, whisper it low, miss-uses!

       

      I hope you are not bored by statistics on the growth of the Internet.  They fascinate me.  Here’s some:

       

      The number of e-mails sent on an average day will reach 10 billion this year and rise to 35 billion by 2005, according to a recent report from International Data (IDC).  Thirty five billion!  That will be two a day for every man, woman and child on the globe.

       

      Commenting on this amazing statistic, IDC spokesman Mark Levitt said that the growth could be " a blessing or a curse depending on how prepared our environments are for them".  Not “environments”, Mr Levitt.  What you mean is “records managers”! 

       

      I won’t bother you with International Data’s calculations on annual usage.  The figures are so huge there isn’t room on the screen for all the noughts. 

       

      A huge percentage of those messages are flowing into and out of Sweden.  This year Sweden, for the first time, edged the United States out of the position of top IT country, according an IDC/World Times survey.  Sweden spent over 7.7 per cent of its gross domestic product on investment in IT, more than any other country, says the European Information Technology Observatory.

      60 million domain names

      Internet domain names will double to 60 million by 2002, according to the British surveyors NetNames.  The figures reveal that Sweden and New Zealand have almost exactly the same number of domain names, per head of population.

       

      E-commerce is running fiercely, but the new phenomenon, m-commerce  (the “m” is for “mobile) is predicted to lose the United States its technology lead in another five years, the Datamonitor market analysis group said in August(2).  Where is the world centre of wireless telecommunications?  Wireless Valley is Sweden, more particularly Stockholm.

       

      Happily, AS4390 has advice for the company chief executive, as well as the records manager.  Let me take you back to Part 3: Strategies again, for example.  Sub-section 2.  Application says it plainly enough:

       

      “This is a voluntary code for application in all organisations.  It may also serve as a benchmark for use by chief executives, senior management or auditors to assess whether adequate records are being kept …”

       

      No, AS4390 hasn't, yet, changed the way administration managers think about records management, but it will.  It provides a model administrators understand and accept once they have been of made aware it.  This awareness is still low but it is increasing.  Publication of ISO15489 will, in fact, further harden that acceptance of recordkeeping good practice.

       

      Is there anything in the Standard for recordkeeping Viking pillagers?  Of course there is!  Us flightless birds of the Southern Continent, the Kiwis, have found a lot in it that we can use.  There is absolutely no reason why the descendents of the fearsome vandals of the North should not, too

       

      Sweden is almost twice the size of New Zealand, with a population three times larger.  Their economies are quite different, Sweden’s is booming, N.Z’s stagnating, at the moment. 

       

      Riksarkivet
        Swedish National Archives

      Sweden’s tradition of archives and records management begins with the 16th century King Gustav Vasa whose letters can be seen, carefully catalogued in the Swedish National Archives.  New Zealand’s comes from Britain where the first archivists, 500 years ago, were University Registers, some of whose work can be found in university archives and the British Library. 

      Different, but much in common

      The nations are different, but they have a quite lot in common, too.  For instance, Sweden and New Zealand are both in the top ten of what the big U.S. Internet watcher, Jupiter Communications, calls the Global Internet Sophistication Index.  It is a table calculated on per capita of households on line, user penetration and gross domestic product.  Likewise, according to OECD figures, both nations are in the top ten of scientific publications per capita.  These two gems of information are in the current issue of a booklet Information Society Showcase published by the Invest in Sweden Agency (ISA).

       

      A search for other New Zealand-Sweden links on the Internet produces some fascinating information.  For instance: the New Zealand Sweden Society in Stockholm.  Its web site indicates it is largely made up of ex-patriot New Zealanders whose common interest seems to be to meet at the Kings Head pub in Fleminggatan, Stockholm, on the last Tuesday of the month.  They obviously haven’t had time for much else because, when I looked in November, the society’s web site was still greeting browsers with a very flaky fireworks Applet and the legends “Happy New Year” and “Happy Millennium”.

       

      Sweden and New Zealand are often compared.  In 1999, for instance, the Canadian Fraser Institute study, The Case For School Choice, drew comparisons between their school fees systems.  The year before, the Stockholm School of Economics Library published a Swedish Working Paper on Economics entitled The Efficacy and Cost of Regime Shifts in Inflation Policies: Evidence from New Zealand and Sweden (3). 

       

      Earlier in 1998, a study by an Australian Parliamentary Social Study Group compared how six nations dealt with their indigenous people, including the Sami in Sweden and New Zealand Maori(4).  

       

      Lars Svensson

      Prof. Lars Svensson

      On financial matters, New Zealand and Sweden have an agreement, signed in 1979, to avoid double taxation between them.  Earlier this year, the New Zealand Finance Minister, Dr Michael Cullen, appointed one of Sweden’s leading economists, Professor Lars Svensson, of the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, to undertake a review of New Zealand monetary policies.

       

      Another important link was on the Swedish Government Offices website.  It was October’s speech(5) by the Swedish ambassador to the United Nations, His Excellency Henrik Salander, introducing a U.N. draft resolution entitled Towards a Nuclear Weapon Free World: the Need for a New Agenda.  He was speaking for Sweden and half a dozen other nations  … including New Zealand.  They joined in calling on reluctant nations to accept the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

       

      With so much in common, I have no doubt the recordkeeping profession in Sweden can find much to help itself in AS4390, just as New Zealand’s has.

      AS4390 Implementation model

      The Standard’s Model Implementation Plan, for example, is a long, detailed checklist of all the processes needed for a successful records management system launch.  It has a generic structure that could apply to any system.

       

      Another checklist in AS4390 is for performance testing of a records management system, and it does not mean just an electronic system.  The list of questions, intended to be answered and recorded regularly throughout the life of the system, helps recordkeepers anywhere ensure continuing compliance with business, regulatory and legal requirements.

       

      Planning to update recordkeeping processes, either to electronic or, the most likely option, to a part paper, part electronic system?  AS4390 has guidance, with advice on planning, testing, training and implementation of the new applications.

       

      Other sections in the Australian Standard give ideas for storage service contracts, environmental conditions for physical storage and disaster response.  All these tenets may not apply in Sweden because of its different legal and, not least of all, meteorological environments, but AS4390 gives much guidance that will set inquirers out along the right road to recordkeeping success and security.

       

      That was what was found in New Zealand.  Could Sweden copy the Kiwis?

      Path to the Kiwi Guide

      There’s a fine tradition of sporting and cultural rivalry between Australia and New Zealand, much as there is between the Scots and the English and, I imagine, the Swedes and the Norwegians.  At the moment, New Zealand is in a rare state of subordination to Australia in all the sporting disciplines New Zealanders hold dear  …  Rugby, Rugby and Rugby! 

       

      They’ve also beaten us at cricket, Rugby league, netball and just about everything else, except rowing and wheelchair polo.

       

      However, we don’t let that get in the way of our admiration for Australia’s recordkeeping theory and practice.  After AS4390 became more widely known in New Zealand, Kiwi recordkeepers tried to get the Standard adopted there.  The two countries have an agreement that often allows joint acceptance of Standards. 

       

      For various reasons, a joint-Standard proved too difficult  --  in other words, too expensive  --  to arrange, so the New Zealanders decided to create a Kiwi Guide to records management and AS4390, an annexe to the Standard setting out New Zealand legal, regulatory and cultural variants.

       

      The New Zealand Guide is in its final draft form before it goes out to selected authorities and experts for appraisal and, hopefully, approval.  It has been a long, three-year process because all the members of the authoring committee are volunteers, of course, and have proper jobs to attend to.  But we are almost at the end of the authoring process.

       

      Once we achieve acceptance, we plan to have the Guide mounted on the World Wide Web and published in hard-copy loose-leafed format suitable for later amending pages.

       

      We started with our legal environment.  A sub-committee of two or three went through all our legislation looking for recordkeeping guidance and requirements.  Dismayingly, though not surprisingly in our political atmosphere, the sub-committee found very little to help recordkeepers, but a great deal to keep them busy.  The authors comment in the chapter of New Zealand Legislation:

       

      “Interestingly, when legislation stipulates that records must be created, it often omits to state by whom, how they should be made available or for what period.” 

       

      I don’t think Sweden has this problem with its Freedom of the Press Act.

       

      The New Zealand Guide divides the laws into sections on finance, privacy, employment, commercial and private sector legislation.  It gives brief detail of the level of record keeping each law requires.  For example, it reveals that Financial Transactions Reporting Act, 1996, has requirements for financial institutions to retain transaction records for at least five years while the Employment Contracts Act, 1991, requires wages and time records throughout the preceding six years to be available to an employee.  Many New Zealand’s Acts are available in the GP Legislation Collection on line from the Knowledge Basket website at http://rangi.knowledge-basket.co.nz/gpacts/actlists.html. 

      Maori deisgn

      Maori cultural concerns

      A major part of the New Zealand Guide deals with ethnic concerns.  New Zealanders have a special responsibility to acknowledge the cultural sensitivities of the country’s indigenous people, the Maori.  It is a responsibility notable more in its omission than commission during the first 100 years or so after Maori chiefs signed a treaty, the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840, ceding sovereignty to the British Crown.  More recently, though, the nation has come to recognise the failings of the past and has begun to put things right.

       

      The traditional Maori view of records and archives is very different to European’s.  In the Polynesian culture, there is very little information that can be regarded as “public”.  This applies particularly to genealogical records, for example.  Maori regard these as intensely private, almost sacred. 

       

      Further, Maori culture sees no propriety in the retention of any artefact beyond its useful life, believing that once an object is worn out it should be disposed of and replaced.  It is a view that obviously conflicts deeply with that of European conservators and, to an extent, archivists.

       

      Influences of modern society are modifying these principles slowly, but recordkeepers dealing with Maori documents and information need to be aware of their existence and ways of dealing sympathetically with them.  The New Zealand Guide sets out such procedures. 

       

      Some of them appear bizarre to European minds but, for example, in its advice on storage of Maori records, the Guide recommends:

       

      “Organisations may wish to consider making a bowl of water available to those who wish to wash their hands either prior to or after consulting records of particular spiritual significance.  The bowl should be specially dedicated to this purpose and refilled each time it is to be used.  Users may also wish to conduct a karakia (prayer) prior to consulting these records.”

       

      The Guide goes on to suggest that, in fact, such insistence on cleanliness in an archive is much to be recommended for other than just cultural reasons.

       

      The Maori language is an official one in New Zealand.  Parliamentarians may and occasionally do speak it in the House of Representatives.  Official documents are increasingly written in English and Maori and all Government departments have Maori names.  One of these, Te Puni Kokiri, is used more often than its English name, the Ministry of Maori Development.

       

      As a result, the New Zealand Guide advises: “Ensure that the organisation establishes a policy on the use of Maori words in classification schemes and acceptable abbreviations and symbols.”

       

      The Guide has a chapter on definitions of terms; another on what we call in New Zealand “stewardship” but really means “responsibility for records” which is not dealt with in any great detail in AS4390, and one listing useful non-regulatory documents and information sources.

       

      The chapter of definitions has an interesting description of the Australian’s “records continuum” view of recordkeeping calling it “a model of management that relates to the recordkeeping regime that is accepted as continuous, dynamic and ongoing without any distinct breaks or phases”.  That’s quiet neat, I reckon, though I’m not sure it helps in the on-going debate between the records continuum school of thought and the records life cyclers.  However, that, too, is another story.

       

      That’s how New Zealand is planning to get its own records management standard without having to pay a fortune for it and without re-inventing any of the massive and world girdling wheels that Australia has constructed.  In view of the closeness of the international standard, the recordkeeping profession in Sweden may be considering something similar.  Please make free with these ideas, if any of them suit you.

       




      For an earlier paper on the Australian Records Management Standard AS4390 by Michael Steemson, see:

        "Cricket, Rugby and Records Management … We've set the Standard"
          shows the development of Australian expertise in recordkeeping principles and the enormous kick-start that AS4390 has given state and federal government take-up of record keeping processes.

       



       


      To return to text, click
      on footnote number.

      Footnotes:

      1.  Legal Admissibility and Evidential Weight of Information Stored Electronically, PD0008: 1999, 2nd edit.  British Standards Institution, London, 1999.

      2.  Source: Datamonitor Group quoted in the Financial Times, August 17, 2000.

      3.  The Efficacy and Cost of Regime Shifts in Inflation Policies: Evidence from New Zealand and Sweden, Sven-Olov Daunfeldt and Xavier de Luna, Swedish Working Papers on Economics No. 475, Stockholm School of Economics Library, Stockholm, October 1998.  URL: http://swopec.hhs.se/umnees/abs/umnees0475.htm.

      4.  Indigenous Affairs in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States of America, Norway and Sweden, Coral Dow & Dr John Gardiner-Garden, Parliamentary Social Policy Group, Canberra, April 1998.  URL: http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bp/1997-98/98bp15.htm.

      5.  Henrik Salander, speech presenting Towards a Nuclear Weapon Free World: the Need for a New Agenda, Document A/C.1/55/L4, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Stockholm, October 2000.  URL: http://www.utrikes.regeringen.se/inenglish/pressinfo/other_speeches/001023.htm.






      To go to the Caldeson Consultancy Home Page, click HERE.





      Michael Steemson
      Michael Steemson

        For more information, mail to:


      Michael Steemson,
      The Caldeson Consultancy.