Keynote address by the Principal of The Caldeson Consultancy, Michael Steemson, to the 14th national convention of the Records Management Association of Australia (RMAA), "Preserving Yesterday Managing Today Challenging Tomorrow", at the Rendezvous Observation City Hotel, Perth, Western Australia, on the third and last day, Wednesday, September 17, 1997. |
The paper identifies a course of development for records and information management to the end of the second decade of the 21st Century. It sets out four crusades of endeavour for records and information managers, the development of internationally accepted codes of practice, standards, retention schedules and management software, in what is perceived as an inevitable revolution to harness and control the soaring paper and electronic record usage in society. It becomes an allegory, describing a records and information fictional (R.I.-fi?) but, it argues, attainable world where "Information Strategy" (IS) has achieved the status of directorship in commerce and the IS Director controls policy and actions on a multi-level business platform.
© Michael Steemson, 1997
The trouble with the closing proximity of the year 2000 is that it no longer has value as a date of iconoclastic portent. Anyone can look forward two years with fair certainty of a successful prediction. So I have cast my runes somewhat further to the next neat, round number and to the Classified Advertisements pages of that not-so-distant age in what I imagine will be called the World Times, on the web site of the Press baron and warrior, Lord Rupert-Murdoch of Murrumbidgee.
I suspect that for most of us now, those job requirements would be a little outside our skill-fields and that many of my contemporary records manager and archivist colleagues would not have to think long or hard before clicking swiftly to the Sky Tv-clips in the sports pages to find the more cheering news that the world-wide Rugby Super 24s had entered the century's second decade with another sensational win for the Queensland Reds against the Cardiff Princes at the Welsh National Rugby stadium.
It will not be such a problem for our records and information manager successors, one generation on. They will have no such worries. All of those qualifications will be the norm, quite as usual as today's MBAs or BAs (Lib. Stud.).
In these late 20th Century days, the records manager, librarian or archivist is hobbled with, and to some extent still clings to, the images of the 19th and earlier centuries. Among the very earliest records managers were university Registers, later called Registraries, whose job was to maintain order in the "bokes and recordys" of the academic administration. Their work involved archiving and research, with responsibility for the maintenance of documentary validity and retention policy.
The work is neatly and unofficially described in the second Cambridge University "Grace Book", the volumes recording university decisions and regulations over 400 years up to the end of the last century. In what might, in some cultures, be regarded as graffiti, an anonymous 16th century bard inscribed a short, poetic panegyric on the fly-leaf:
Who deue wilbe a Register
shulde holde his pen in truthe entyere
Ensearch he ought recordes of olde
the dowte to trye; the right to holde
The lawes to know he must contende
Olde customys eke: he should expende
No paynes to wright he maye refuse
His office ellys: he dothe abuse. (1)
My Microsoft Word® spell checker had a fit over that little piece of doggerel. But, even though the quill pens have gone ... and the high stools in chill basements ... it still sounds pretty familiar to late 20th Century records managers. As many among that august assembly will know, the attitude of many modern businesses perpetrates the idea that we are simply filing clerks with fancy names, and expect to pay salaries and provide working conditions to match.
There is a host of signposts to events and practices that will bring about a revolution in the way commerce perceives the management of its information. But the learning curves for bosses and managers alike will be dangerously precipitous.
After the invention of paper and ink, the first communications techno-leap was the 15th Century construction of William Caxton's printing press. Exploitation of printing matched the pace of the advance of culture as books got cheaper and the world began to learn to read. Few records management processes were needed, but those that were, developed systemically alongside the information advances and were eventually called Archiving.
It is not many years since all information was delivered by hand. Our 18th and 19th Century forefathers were agog with wonder as runners with cleft sticks developed into despatch riders. Foreign news stories for the London daily newspapers were written in elaborate copper-plate script, sealed in water-tight barrels - water-tight or the ink ran - and dropped over the side of sailing ships off the Cornish coast where waiting packet boatmen scooped them up and rowed them ashore. A lively little Cornish newspaper was named the Falmouth Packet in memory of the process.
The precious message was thrust into the saddle bag of a post rider who would gallop the 400 or so miles to London on a series of fast post horses, so-called because they were kept at "post houses", or inns. We still call it "the post", as a result. It took days, but the news got published long before the sailing ship made port. News of Admiral Lord Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar only 190 years ago reached London's The Times newspaper and the British public in this fashion.
Later technology speeded the processes: wireless telegraphy, railway systems, steam and internal combustion engines. The wonderment and excitement in the centuries' technologies was echoed in the names taken by many of the period's rapidly-emerging newspapers - Express, Telegraph, Mail, Post, Courier, even Times, indicating currency and up-to-datedness.
Office technologies, too, improved from the quill and high stool. Typewriting machines, carbon paper, dictographs and telephones, copying machines, and other contrivances improved efficiency and increased information output.
But, none of these new wonders was very user-friendly. They allowed an increased range of information sources and speed of delivery but most needed special skills and many were, and are, extremely labour-expensive, limiting information volumes. For a time, archiving applications kept pace, but the need for what we now know as Records Management began to show.
The latest techno-leap, electronics, has developed at unprecedented and unimagined speed, producing and accessing information of unprecedented quantity and often dubious quality at unprecedented speed, giving absolutely no time for Records Management processes to evolve naturally.
The Internet and its hyper-active progeny intranets, extranets and the World Wide Web, are both part of the problem and part of the solution to that problem. The sky-rocketing increase in Internet and intranet usage is creating hitherto unimagined amounts of high-quality, high-value information and dumping it unceremoniously into the laps of businesses which very often have no idea what to do with it, nor how to exploit the opportunities it presents.
Academics have spotted the warning signs. In a May, 1997,report of a study by the University of British Columbia's Master of Archival Studies programme into "The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records", principal investigator Luciana Duranti reported:
 Prof. Luciana Duranti |
"It is generally recognised that, while computer technology makes the production, transmission, manipulation, organisation, maintenance and consultation of records easier, faster, and cheaper, it also represents a threat to their integrity, accessibility and preservation. The difficulties associated with making and keeping trustworthy records in electronic form provided the justification for a three-year ... research project." (2)
Professor Duranti's paper, presented to a meeting of the University of Pittsburgh Electronic Records Project Advisory Group, on February 1-2, 1996, of electronic records managers and consultants in Pennsylvania, holds a panoply of diplomatics and records management wisdom. But the astonishing, seemingly unchanging fact is that most parts of the business world are blissfully unaware and unconcerned about the dangers of ignoring crucial record-keeping functions in modern management.
In the British Fourth Estate, the newspaper world, news information management is simple knowledge management. I spent the last eight years applying imaging systems to the control and presentation of news records, both text and photographs. Many newspaper companies now have similar systems and yet still use stand-alone PCs for secretaries and managers. Senior men dismiss acronyms like LAN and words like Intranet as typographical errors that could have been spotted if newspapers hadn't long ago fired all their proof readers. As with so many other facets of business, the big difficulty is one of persuading executives that they do have a problem.
It is a problem that does not, yet, seem particularly large in every neck of the business woods. But it soon will be. It's causing horrendous difficulties in many parts of the developed world already.
Word is getting out, though ... slowly! All over the business world, now, conferences are addressing these problems, and the message is beginning to be heard. There was the study group at Pittsburgh where selected world experts pondered the management of electronic records. In London last autumn, the international management consultants Deloitte & Touche sponsored a two-day conference to raise the level of awareness of the need for business information management. The conference was called "Information - the Fourth Resource", a name inspired by the title of a book recently published by one of the Deloitte & Touche partners, Dr David Best, and an allusion to a traditional British view of commerce requiring three principal resources: Pounds, People and Property. Outside of the Sterling area, the alliteration could be amended to Money, Manpower and Material or Merchandise.
The conference aimed to explore the benefits of exploiting information assets, examine best-practice, identify information links to business needs and, as a conference pamphlet put it: "Assess practical ways of managing information using a case-study approach detailing possible solutions and areas for further development."
David Best chaired the conference and read a paper on strategic directions to information management. One of my colleagues in the Records Management Society of Great Britain (RMS), Catherine Hare, a senior lecturer at the Department of Information and Library Management at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle upon Tyne, entitled her paper "Who is Managing Your Information?"
The deputy director of the Swedish National Archives, Claes Gränström, spoke about the legal problems of access, use and storage of computerised information in Europe. London consultant Alison North, another friend and RMS colleague, called her paper, amusingly, "The Red Queen's Race", and asked the audience if ability to process information impacted directly on the success of business. Understandably, they and she agreed firmly that it did.
There were papers on Information Auditing, Information Resource Management, Gaining Involvement of Users in Defining Measures of IT systems, the Cost and Value of Information, and Information Systems Management and Policy in Action. It was all very positive and focused, as these events always are, of course, but actually what it was saying was: "Hey, wake up you businessmen, before you get overwhelmed!"
There has been no shortage of warnings to information managers of the on-coming deluge. I remember the horror on the faces of records managers at an RMS seminar a couple or so years ago when a senior records manager, Jean Samuel, from the Pfizer pharmaceutical group, warned:
"Control of e-mail is a records management job. The implications of e-mail without controls is appalling. Records managers cannot afford to ignore this very powerful piece of records creation. We must give our users guidance, manage the issues that e-mail creates. Get involved now, or it will be too late." (3)
She said that the world-wide production and research platforms of modern pharmaceutical manufacturing made e-mail an ideal form for the quick, easy and cost-effective distribution of information. Ms Samuel said: "The question is, how far can all this go? How can we make use of it and how much could it compromise our own companies' commercial information?"
There was another timely warning, this time from U.S. electronic records consultant Rick Barry, whom some delegates will remember speaking to this conference last year. In a paper published in The Record, the journal of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), last year, Rick wrote:
 Rick Barry |
"It used to be that major changes came in periodic cycles with time in between to acknowledge, digest, accept, adapt and master to the best of our abilities. Now, and we are warned for the foreseeable future, change will be an inherent feature of modern organisations ... to sense, learn and adapt to ... in ways that earlier we attributed only to humans and other biological forms. It is easy to understand why some archives and records management professionals throw up their hands and hope that it will all somehow work itself out before anything really bad happens." (4)
Earlier this year, in Informaa Quarterly, RMAA Education Committee member Josette Mathers published her Bachelor of Applied Science (Records Management) degree study of the use of Intranets for managing corporate information and its alignment with records management principles. She warned:
 Josette Mathers |
"There is little authoritative information in the literature which discusses the implications for records management practices and procedures. It would appear that most organisations are still coming to terms with the new technology and have not considered all the organisational impacts associated with its introduction." (5)
So, how far has the Information Boom gone, and where is it going? What bad things are happening? When will organisations begin to take this seriously? One thing is certain: it's going to get much, much bigger. Here are few statistics to show the extent of the problem and probably frighten the more timid amongst us.
Fifty per cent of the world's fibre optic capacity is currently under-used. (6)
Thirty five million people were using the Internet last year and the number is expected to double in 1997. (6a)
New Zealand commercial Internet users last year increased 150 per cent to 103,000 with more than 30 service providers (7). A survey put 200,000 regular users in New Zealand, a country with the population of 3.5 million. (7)
A 1991 survey of UN organisations showed fax traffic increasing four times and e-mail ten times over three years against a two-thirds reduction in telex, a net trebling of message numbers. (8)
Researchers predict that next year, more than half the large organisations in North America will be using Intranets. (9)
Fifteen million corporate workers are already using them. (9)
Two thirds of the top 500 companies in the United States have or are considering the use of Intranets. (9)
The standard Compact Disc carries around 600 megabytes of data. The new Digital Video Discs being shipped with Toshiba PCs hold 8½ gigabytes at double intensity. Dual-sided discs due in the next few years will carry as much as 17Gb. (10)
PC sales in Australia last year: 1.4 million. (7)
Six hundred million pages are created daily world-wide from computer printouts.(11)
BIS Strategic Decisions estimates that the US creates about 1.3 trillion documents annually, and all but 5% of them on paper. (11)
Total industry shipment of business papers - those used primarily for the business, office, and off-set printing markets - was 12.9 million tons in 1994 and was projected to be 13.2 million tons in 1995, an increase of about 2½ percent. (11)
By 2005, scientists expect to have analysed all three billion human DNA (deoxyribo nucleic acid) sequences responsible for everything from hair colour to the ability to fight off disease. (12)
All records and information managers will know similar facts. Every one of those details points trembling fingers towards escalating volumes of information and soaring difficulties with its management. What is needed is a breed of evangelising records and information managers who can and will bring the word to the boardroom. And the word is "Order!"
A significant part of those statistics shows that it is not only electronic messaging that is on the increase. Paper-based information still represents a huge percentage of the soaring business word-count, and all the signs are that it will continue to do so way past that magic 2000 date-line. The costs associated with paper will continue to rise, also. These and other escalating prices will, eventually, bring business leaders to declare for the records management crusade.
Every archivist and records manager knows the syndrome ... print the information out and file it. It's old fashioned, but it's simple. Paper has the context (metadata), content and structure already nicely embedded together on the record. Right! Except that increasingly, now, the paper is a print-out of an electronic record where some of the context, and possibly structure, resides in the software or in directories that don't get printed out with the content. But, paper is tactile, understandable, stable, isn't it? It's easy to persuade oneself of these truths. Easy, that is, until disaster hits, like a terrorist bombing in Oklahoma or London, an earthquake in Kyoto or a tornado in Charleston, when buildings are torn open and paper burns or blows away.
I saw it myself for days after the IRA's bombing in Bishopsgate, London, in the early 90's. From my office window on the South Bank of the River Thames, a mile away from the shattered City towers, I could see businesses simply blowing away as a brisk Southerly wind sent a blizzard of paper - files, invoices, contracts, memoranda, reports and letters - pouring through shattered glass screen-walls into the streets and the river. Many companies lost all their records and collapsed.
None-the-less, the biggest cost of paper-held information is less dramatic, but makes many a budget-conscious financial director's eyes water. He knows the price of office floor space. It can be as high as the ceiling $100 a square metre, $500 a square metre, you name it! But has he ever calculated the space needed for a standard A4 filing cabinet? I doubt it! It's around one square metre, about nine square feet, and that's allowing only three square feet for the secretary to stand or bend in beside an open drawer.
Off-site storage can vary wildly, from 20 cents up to a dollar a box per month, in some places. If any warehoused item has to be retrieved, it can cost $10 a box just to get it off the shelf, plus delivery charges.
Figures on the costs incurred in filing and retrievals abound, too. Some say that executives spend half their office time looking for information. The average work desk contains 18,000 pieces of paper, slightly less than a third of which will be in use. Three percent of all files are misfiled. Up to nine percent will be lost, with search and replacement costs ranging from $50 to $150 a document, according to some statistics I saw recently. All that paper weighs a ton, too. Here are some more eye-opening facts:
Increasingly, modern office blocks are built with costly, specially-reinforced floors for archive space.
Disembark the paper needed to operate a modern aircraft carrier and it would draw a metre less draught.
Without its paper burden, a Boeing 747 Jumbo jet would be able to carry one more fare-paying passenger.
A U.S. F-14 jet fighter is lighter than the administration and technical paper required in its manufacture.
At something between a cent and a penny an A4 sheet, and much, much more for specialist products, we are talking big money. With the number of paper documents totalling around one and a quarter trillion annually in the United States alone, the quantity of paper used each year in the whole world becomes so large as to be completely meaningless. But, think of the trees, the energy, and the transport it all uses!
Postage for the internal snail mail runs at around half a dollar for most nations' first or fast-class letters. International postage can be around three times that. By comparison, e-mail messages rarely cost more than 20 cents each, and usually much less, to anywhere in the world.
Consider, too, the costs associated with paper work getting it to all the places it is needed for approvals, replies, reactions and decisions. What of the cost of delays when, perhaps, paper is sitting in in-boxes of sick staff, or moving physically from one company mail room to another? A transaction that takes a few minutes with electronic communications can often take days and extra staff to act upon. These are indirect costs that are hard to quantify but they must include pay and benefits for all the staff people involved and possible lost productivity and client base if the level of service is not as high or higher than the competition.
These sorts of costs can concentrate the minds of any respectable board of directors. Shareholders can be much impressed by such savings. But who is to provide the planning, the knowledge and understanding to bring those golden geese home to roost?
In true J. R. R. Tolkien style, the Records Manager Evangelist sweeps to centre-stage, brandishing his mighty, cost-cutting Sword of Order. Out with the Paper Tiger, he cries. And, lo, before your very eyes, the Sword of Order becomes, if I may be excused for mixing a metaphor, a Rod for his Own Back. The very act of casting out the monster threatens his own existence. An archives and records manager of the "print it out and file it, like we always did" school will spot the likelihood of our Evangelist cutting himself out of a job, along with the tiger.
But, fear not! Salvation is at hand! As the Paper Tiger slinks out, what is that shadow that falls across the Financial Director's Axminster, sending his/her secretary screaming for the security department or the washroom? Red in byte and clause, devouring Commerce Damsels in its path, it is Tyrannosaurus Techs!
From a costs point of view, technology has no equal for devouring the dollars or punishing the pounds Sterling. But, by the same token, it can be shown to make huge savings which is why companies are taking to it so willingly, some, it has to be said, like those Commerce Damsels I refer to in the above aberration. The difference can and will be the records and information manager.
I notice that I have, thus far, omitted to include any section with the emboldened heading "Definitions". Perhaps I should make rectification, at this point. In the now universally-understood technology jargon, the "R's" stand for records, "I's" for information and the "M's" for management. They are the money-makers.
It's those "T's", the Tyrannosaurus Techs, which are the dollar-monsters. How can they be controlled? In truth, there is little point in looking to their creators for constraint. The "T's" are leading their new-age Dr Frankensteins about by their hot little bits ... and bytes. Only the records and information managers can shackle the beasts. And the weapons at our disposal are standards, codes, retention schedules and management-designed and applied software.
Australia has lead the world in many things, most of them creditable. One of its most remarkable achievements in this last decade of the 20th Century is the design, establishment and production of a thorough-going, workable, understandable standard for Records Management, Australian Standard AS4390, a handsome, yellow-jacketed, loose-leafed tome which may be purchased from Standards Australia for, I think, a princely $73 Australian.
The standard's importance cannot be over-emphasised. It's a sword and shield for any besieged records and information manager, archivist or administrator. Take a look at some of the wisdom within it.
"Records management is integral to the functions of any business as it enables the control of one of the most important resources in any organisation - recorded information." (13)
Now, that's something to wave under the noses of a sceptical board of directors, and it's not just the Records Manager talking. That's straight from the wise old bosom of Mother Australia!
The standard burst on an unsuspecting world early last year, after a lot of work by a group of dedicated Australian information experts. I saw it mentioned in a 1995 discussion on the U.S. records management Internet listserver. I e-mailed Ken Ridley, I think it was, and received details from him. It was a revelation! Try this for a piece of business anarchy:
"Record-keeping is not the province of archivists, records managers or systems administrators alone, but is an essential role of all employees." (14)
So important is this Australian standard, that it is being taken up by other nations, Britain and the United States in particular, with a view to adopting it for themselves and backing Standards Australia in getting it approved by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). I helped kick that process along late in 1995 when I had lunch in London with Christine Ardern, the manager of the Archives and Records Management department at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) in Toronto, ARMA Region XII Vice-president (overseas regions) and now ARMA President-elect. Over an excellent bottle of Brown Brothers sauvignon blanc, my guest indicated she was as impressed with the Australian wine and the RM standard work as I. We agreed that AS4390 should become an ISO document.
The rest of the story you will have already heard. David Moldrich, chairman of the Standards Australia's AS4390 committee, was appointed chairman of an ISO committee which included Christine Ardern and my successor as chairman of the Records Management Society, Philip Jones, records manager for the English Midlands county of Staffordshire.
The ISO-ratified Records Management Standard should be published next year. For the first time, as far as I'm aware, the world will be telling its business people that records management is not just a job that some funny little body looks after in a back room, but is everyone's responsibility, from post room messenger to chairman. Armed with this authority, can we fail to get the message heard? Alas, we could, without a fight! It would be a great mistake to imagine that when we have the standard, we can sit back and watch its directives take effect. Standards, especially international ones, can be completely ignored by target groups and, with the exceptions, perhaps, of ISOs on messaging (X.400) and directory services (X.500), often have been.
The Australian standard's basic principles for an ISO have been agreed by the leading high-tech countries like the U.S., Britain, Sweden, Germany and Australia, of course, but there is less agreement over the implementation procedures. If the international standard is agreed without the Australian "how-to's", then it may be more difficult to get accepted. More work here for the RM Evangelist!
 "Code of Practice for Legal Admissibility of Information stored on Electronic Document Management Systems" |
AS4390 sets out good practice codes for records management. Other codes deal with more specific ideals, like the British Standards Institution's Code of Practice for Legal Admissibility of Information stored on Electronic Document Management Systems (15). It's a bit of a mouthful, that title, so I shall refer to it by its BSI publication number, PD0008. The PD stands for Public Document. It is not a standard, precisely, but a set of voluntary guidelines giving imaging system users ways of ensuring, as much as anyone can, that their digital documents and images will be acceptable as evidence in the courts.
The PD0008 code was another remarkable achievement. It, too, should become an International Standrads Organsation document and add steel to the armoury of the information managers of the future. I was closely involved in the code's preparation and I know that, like all worthwhile advances, seemingly, it was not achieved without sweat and tears I cannot remember any blood being shed, but at times that seemed not unlikely!
The story of the code's advent begins almost a decade ago, again in Australia. I give details of the development, and of other nations' solutions to the prickly problem, in the paper How to Make the Law Love your Image. Additional reading my be found on the new Records and Information Management On-line Service (RIMOS).
British information technology consultant Hayley Keenan's case study A Welcome Advance in the Implementation of Electronic Document Management Systems details the application the Code of Practice principles at her then company, the Woolwich Building Society.
The BSI published PD0008 in February 1996. The code authors had identified five separate areas of control impacting on evidential record-keeping in image storage systems. They set them out as:
The code describes its scope as covering "aspects of document management that impinge upon issues of legal admissibility of digitised images". Moreover, it deals with considerations beyond this where "such aspects include the legibility and completeness of the document images and the transfer of the images into other systems".
So successful has the Code been that BSI has subsequently published two further documents to create a "legal set" of public documents. First came the Compliance Workbook (16), called PD0009, with which electronic document managers may ensure their systems conform with the requirements of PD0008. It comes in loose-leaf form and follows precisely the course of the Code, allowing managers to check off each requirements as they conform, then scan the check list onto their system to validate it for future managers.
The third document, published in 1997, is PD0010, Principles of Good Practice for Information Management (17) written by Bill Mayon-White, Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and founder of the Image and Document Management Association (IDMA), one of the co-authors of PD0008, and his LSE Enterprises consultancy colleague Bernard Dyer. As the document’s title implies, it sets out good record-keeping practice and was, in its earliest form, the foundation of the Code of Practice.
The three documents make up the "legal set" of Public Documents the records manager needs to minimise the fear of court challenge, a re-assurance essential for the successful implementation of an image-based document storage system.
The one weapon still to be invented for our hero, the Records Manager Evangelist, is the universal retention schedule. It's a thorny billet to grasp. One organisation's records retention schedules can be irrelevant or even deceiving to another. The problem is that no-one has any particularly reliable answer to the question: How long should a document be retained after its active life is over?
Quick answer: How long's a piece of string?
Real answer: It all depends!
Apart from regulations in the pharmaceutical and petroleum industries, little legislation exists to guide business information managers struggling with the problem. Their business principals press for clearance of storage from expensive floor space. But their professional principles tell them to keep it handy, in case it's needed. To resolve the puzzle, information managers resort to an agreed list of time spans. They call them retention schedules but generally they are one or more of these three variations:
The seven-year ditch: That's my name for it. After seven years you can ditch the document. Eighty percent of legal retention schedules demand this. Why seven years or, more accurately, the current year plus six? It derives from the Inland Revenue tax return retention requirements. Why do Her Majesty's Inspectors require current year plus six? Precedence! Which means that no-one really knows but "we've always done it like that".
Additionally, seven is still a magic number. It sounds safe. But more important, it's also a little longer than the average term of employment across commerce. The thought process: After seven years it'll be someone else's problem!
Lifetime plus: In some industries, like the aviation or insurance worlds, documents may be kept for the lifetime of the product. In human resources record-keeping, personnel and benefits files are maintained selectively until after the death not only of the employee but of the surviving spouse. That all makes sense. But then someone adds that nasty little "plus", and you're back to the seven year ditch. "Lifetime plus" has a splendid resonance. It's safe, you say, not a cop-out!
Wrong! It's just the feel good/feel safe factor again. It derives from law-makers' doubts but it sounds as if someone has known what he's talking about and made a decision!
For ever: The ultimate cop-out? There are documents that should be kept for ever for historical, not commercial reasons. Think of the Domesday Book (1086), so called because William the Conqueror said it must be kept until then - the first recorded retention schedule, Magna Carta (1215), the American Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). Other more mundane documents can be of very long, continuing value: invention patents, census returns, papers of some elected officials, records of the development of companies like Microsoft that have made great changes to the social fabric of our world, and so on.
But in most organisations, excepting Governments, it's rarely necessary to keep records "for ever". We are getting to grips with the problem with the introduction of another Australian innovation, the records continuum, but more often than not, "for ever" allocations in the contemporary records "life-cycle" procedure avoid a decision because of the lawyers' and information managers' uncertainties.
Some organisations have already produced schedules of general principal. In Australia, the New South Wales Archives Authority has a series of useful publications on General Records Disposal Schedules (18) available as disks or books. Britain's Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators (ICSA) has a comprehensive set of suggestions. In the United States, some branches of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) and a number of universities and local government authorities have put theirs and others' schedules on their world wide web sites. Here's a list of a few of them, culled from the Internet.
These sources show that broad guidelines can be devised industry by industry in the U.S., at least. As business activity becomes more attuned to increasingly invasive and pervasive electronic processes, the adaptation of universal retention protocols will become more acceptable. That has not happened yet, but the course is set fair for information managers. They will put more strings in the business re-engineering bow of the Records Management Evangelist.
The Records Manager Evangelist has his noble sword, shield and bow of standards, codes and schedules. But his secret weapon is records management software. In the new age of burgeoning business technology, this is the ultimate armament with which to win the business laurels. It will bring him Commercial Street cred., a Harley Davidson Buell S3T Thunderbolt for the Business Information Management Mongrel Mob. RM software gets bigger and better every day and, with it, the Evangelist can roar through the work ethic to take pole position on the management speedway to the stars.
The information management world is awash with RM software packages. Some of them are very focused in their applications, many limited to computer-assisted management of paper records. Of the few, true electronic records management packages, the best can provide solutions to some of the oldest information management problems. Some, currently, have had to be scaled up to large-user requirements by marriages with other systems, but ultimately, these packages and their successors will free records and information managers for much more exciting, exacting and essential work. They will be developing strategic business information processes within their organisations, designing the record-keeping functionality and identifying and linking records assets to the business processes.
Many modern records and archives managers, sooner or later will need one of the systems with electronic record-keeping functionality and for the best of them, you need look no further than Australia or New Zealand, unless you want to. One of the Australian systems, the TRIM® package produced by Tower Software of Deakin, A.C.T., I first heard about through an American contact. Then I saw it demonstrated in London where the A.I.S. records management partnership was using and promoting it. Its list of major users - Australian federal and state government offices, companies and organisations in the U.S., South Africa, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea - is recommendation enough to make it worth giving managing director Brand Hoff a call.
Then there's GMB's RecFind® stable of RM products, another Australian success with world-wide users and distribution. From Christchurch, New Zealand, I've seen Contec Data's C2® library and information management system. Now it has C3 and, from what I see on the Contec website, a C4 marque. All these packages are, I can attest, making impressions down in the labyrinths of British IT exhibitions where Archives and Records Managers prowl, searching for the ultimate weapon to add to their ARMoury.
In Britain, there's a great array of software tagged with acronyms or smart, cryptic names with upper-case letters in the middle of them. The Records Management Society each year publishes a list of them, with extensive details. There's PRO-RIMS, by MDIS, Inmagic DB/Textworks, IMPReS from MFT, and RIMS from PSSoftware, TDOC and TRACS and CAIRS and CALM and CORA. On State-side, of course, there's an even mightier choice of multi-letter acronyms: AIIMS by MIS, and its relation RIIMS, GENCAT by Eloquent, GAIN by TRIADD, ARMIS by Resomax, STAR by Cuadra Associates … the list is almost endless.
Notice all those "I's" for Information, "R's" for Records and "M's" for Management? The message is getting through! Actually, I have to own up … I mislead you slightly. The M in MDIS is for McDonnell, as in McDonnell Douglas, and in GMB it stands for McKenna, the founding father. Those Scots … so quick to ravage an Englishman's pet theory! But, seriously, what all these curious hieroglyphs actually spell out for the records and information manager of the first generation of the new Millennium is ... freedom to fly.
Fly we will, if we want to. But, where do we find that all-important Records Management Evangelist? I believe you are sitting there. You, collectively, are the Evangelist, you and all the other practitioners in the noble art of records-keeping. If the runes are right, you will be picking up those weapons in the Evangelist's armoury and taking them to the business front-line.
You will pick them up with excitement, for the prospects for information management are electric. Listen to Chicago company Director of Knowledge and Information Manager, Lois Remeikis, warming to the description of her job with the international group Booz-Allen and Hamilton:
"What we are attempting to do is to define, create, capture, use, share and communicate the company's best thinking about the many different subjects that impact the company's work. Obviously this activity, this quest, is a little different in each organisation, in each of the sub-units of the company, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be looked at, or that we don't try to pull it all together." (19)
Now, there speaks a Records Management Evangelist. Only Lois Remeikis doesn't call the process Records Management. She's head of her company's Knowledge and Information Management, with responsibility for its global "Knowledge Online" operations, information and research services and library automation. But she has picked up all the Evangelist's weapons. We all will be doing the same.
Australia has a records management standard. The nation has given its authority to a set of disciplines that says to businessmen: "Your records are your business life-blood and this is the way to run your records organisation." It gives Australian record-keepers a head start and a huge advantage over their world peers.
All the more reason why we, and every records-keeper, should actively support the world leaders, David Moldrich, Christine Ardern and the rest, so that our less-fortunate colleagues in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere too can have the weapon of a forceful, useable international standard.
What will we be able to do, in these distant Antipodes? We must talk. We can lobby. We will inform. We will get off our apathy! We will be read what is going on in the rest of the world and, perhaps, discovering why other nations' records-keepers are not happy with the Australian standard's applications. One reason may be that Australians are rarely seen at international standards meeting.
My colleagues at the British Standards Institution will attest to that. They attend the world forums religiously and have much influence in the establishment of world standards. They report, not always positively, on the power and influence of United States, German and French standards makers. They wonder why a powerful, burgeoning technological nation like Australia, is so rarely represented.
If we want the world to accept the validity of our processes and adopt them as its own, we must take part in the world debate. There will be no gain without pain. In order to take part, we will need funds. We will have to get them from Government or commerce. To do that, we will have to demonstrate the importance to commerce of the codes and the standards. It's a great big vicious circle. Now is the time to break into the circle, and the future of our profession as records-keepers depends on our breaking into it.
Get onto the Internet discussion groups, the listservers, and put our points of view. Explain to them why we think our way's the way to go and why the international standard is important and must have applications teeth.
In the past decade, Australia has reached and, in places, surpassed levels of technology knowledge in the rest of the world. In applying these technologies, Australia has a huge advantage over its fellow nations. It has a lower level of investment in the earlier new technologies and avoids the deadening constraints of having to use old, obsolete processes just because of the huge capital investment they represent. In these Antipodes, we have been able to take our own techno-leap straight into new technology's second generation of increasing cross-platform compatibility, user-friendly migration processes and plummeting price-tags. And we are geographically situated to put this enormous advantage to enormous use.
One of the reasons I am so delighted to be able to call myself an Australasian again is that I join the Pacific Rim's newest zone of technological excellence just as China, the world's biggest un-tapped customer, comes gasping up out of its medieval miasma into the smoggy stratosphere of so-called Western civilisation. It looks rather like abandoning the frying pan's heat for the flames of the fire, but Chinese dragons don't fear that.
Pacific Rim nations, most importantly Australia and our mighty north-eastern neighbour, are ideally placed in the strategic offensive to sate the insatiable appetites of those dragons for Western wonder-technologies. Australian business knows it and is girding itself for the fray. We records managers and keepers will be up there in the front line of the offensive with the inside-track to modern, efficient, on-time business intelligence, with knowledge and tools at our finger tips to restrain, control and husband the huge inflow of records and information the new business will create ... the information services that are, in some business spheres, being referred to as knowledge management.
Australian and the world's businesses will need this guidance, even if they don't now it yet. In the coming months and years, we must talk to our business partners, peers and superiors, tell them how the standards can fortify their business offensives. We must, as individuals and groups, lobby the movers and shakers of commerce and industry, solicit their interest, seduce their commercial intellects into understanding that there is money to be made and saved by harnessing record-keeping standards and strategies to their business processes. That's the immediate future of record-keeping. We have a powerful, easy-to-articulate message. But we have to evangelise it.
All the above applies just as much to Codes of Practice. Australia is at an advantage with its best practices set out in AS4390. But we need to be able to re-assure our business leaders that we understand their disquiet over matters like the legal admissibility of evidential documents from image systems.
We will have to join the international debate on the subject, examining the British code and the Canadian standard; deciding where they fit Australasia, what needs amending, and getting involved with the International Standards Organisation's deliberations. That's where your expertise and crusade will be effective.
If your organisation is using or planning to use imaging technology, I recommend that you read the two works and see what needs to be done. Until the ISO agrees an international document, these documents are as good as there is to give company guidance on this thorny issue. Because they are foreign, your organisations will be reluctant to pay them much attention. You Records Management evangelists will be able to reassure your bosses that, in principle, the codes could apply anywhere. They set out what is "good practice". By applying your own legislation where it fits, you will have an effective argument to support your imaged documents' use as evidence should they ever be challenged in a court case.
Conformity is not a simple process, but it's well within the wit of anyone with a basic grounding in the technology's applications. It requires a good deal of preparation work, the writing of process manuals and establishment or validation of security procedures. Annual surveys are recommended to ensure prescribed processes are adhered to and still appropriate. That's good practice whether you are concerned about evidential weight or not.
As image and other electronic storage systems pervade the business world, companies will become more aware of the need to ensure their archives are able to produce legally-acceptable documents. The need for a code is becoming more pressing as more of this system-validatiion work is required. It is the records and information managers who will be pressing for adoption of a code to help them do the job. The tools are there. We must get the authority to use them.
 "Electronic Records Policy" |
We are making progress with retention schedules. The Australian concept of the records continuum is gaining world recognition. Many U.S. academic organisations have devised schedules with processes worth emulating. The National Archives of New Zealand 74-page Electronic Records Policy, usefully separates the application of "housekeeping schedules" from what it calls the "office automation schedules". It explains the differences this way:
"The objective of the schedule and guidelines is to separate the final version of an electronic record of corporate significance from the clutter of non-corporate or 'personal' information and personal filing 'non-systems', and to see it become part of the corporate record, either on a properly organised multi-user (i.e. shared) paper file system or on a similarly-organised electronic file system incorporating accepted document management principles." (20)
They are all useful guides, but in most cases, records-keepers must devise their organisation's own processes. Commercial retention scheduling is often a hard nut to crack. During my office as chairman of the RMS, I tried to find a way of generalising the processes to provide guidance to records managers across all parts of industry. We surveyed the Society's members, almost all of whom said they would like guidance. Very few had schedules of their own. My term of office finished before the job was much past the first furlong post and the volunteer investigation group found the project was taking too much of its members' time. It seemed that not only were the needs of industry widely disparate, but the firms within each industry differed hugely, too.
But it's going to be done. Until there is an agreed retention schedule built into the electronic system, records-keepers are never going to have the time to get out of the back room. They will be head-down over the archiving procedures. Writing and approving a schedule is very time consuming, but it will only have to be done from scratch once. Then you will get on with more interesting things, like teaching staff to use it!
Software really is your secret weapon. Good, stable, scaleable electronic document management systems, are still few, but they are increasing and improving. You RM evangelists will keep abreast of these developments by going to the exhibitions, seeing what's out there.
More importantly, you will be getting involved in the designing of the systems. If you are lucky enough to work in an organisation with its own systems department, cosy up to the department head, offer to attend his department meeting as "an observer", have lunch with his analysts and programmers, occasionally. They eat, too, you know, and you will be pleasantly surprised how open most of them are to your thoughts.
Because, like everyone else, they will like to be able to produce material that will be of use, that will be applauded when it is applied. But the strangest part of about many systems programmers and analysts is that they hate to ask users' opinions. Don't ask me why, I've no idea. But I've come across it too often for it to be an exception.
However, once you get their confidence, mostly by not asking too many stupid questions, they will usually be delighted to listen to what you, the user, want their systems to do. Then, they will admit that there really is no such thing in programming as "can't"! A computer can be made to do anything except, for the moment, feel guilty! So when a programmer says to you "it can't be done", what he is really saying is "it's too difficult/expensive/time consuming" or "I don't know how to do that".
If you do not have access to a system department, you will get involved with your local systems users group. That's the place where users go to whinge to vendors about the inadequacies of their products. If you come up with suggestions as to how the system might be made more useful to you and your organisations, you will find the suppliers will listen. If they don't, tell them again, speak at their forums, persuade the group to back you. Use a bigger stick!
There will be many battles with systems managers who disagree or try to discredit your requests. It's often happened to me. "Oh, why do you need 20 megabyte files, anyway! We can crunch them down to 5K and whizz them about the system, no problem! What's the difference?" You evangelists will tell them that the difference is "quality". It will take time, but your successors in the distant future will thank you for persevering.
Get into the Internet and intranet systems. When your organisation sends staff out of the office to work - engineers, salesmen, investigators, dealers, buyers or directors - they still need information. In fast-moving industry, sales figures, statistics, specifications and layouts can change minute by minute. Personnel working remote from the office, without access to these company resources, are at a disadvantage. To get instant, up-to-the-minute answers for often complex questions, intranets have the solutions. And as a sales tool, they make good impressions. Soon a salesman will not be able to work efficiently without one.
The Internet is a vast source of information for records and information managers, as well as industry generally. The many listservers, electronic discussion and debating groups set up by professional and skill communities to share knowledge, air grievances and seek guidance, fill the 'Net with more expertise that you or any of our fellow managers could assimilate in a lifetime's study.
They have extraordinary names like aus-archivists@asap.unimelb.edu.au, or recmgmt@listserv.syr.edu, or erecs-l@cnsibm.albany.edu. But the debates that go on among the list users are sometimes fierce, usually informative, sometimes funny, sometimes tedious beyond belief. But if you want to know what is the latest answer to your new problem, put the question on the listserver and you can guarantee at least an interesting discussion and perhaps an answer from someone who's met the problem before, or knows someone who has.
Biggest spin-off of all will be that you will learn a lot more about the systems you are expected to operate. You will learn some of the mysteries of the techno-speak that baffles many of us at the moment. Eventually, you won't have to keep asking what a GUI is, or why dithering is so useful, or how many bytes make six.
Don't fear the Internet, grasp it. Learn how to use it, then apply that knowledge to creating an intranet within your office. With good RM software running in the background of your intranet system, you will be able to control records creation when it occurs outside the office, as well as internally.
Some of you will become proficient in the use of the machines and turn to teaching others. Some of you will take advantage of the rising number of new tertiary academic courses for records management and systems administration. Some of you will, of course, remember that you don't need to know what makes the wheels go round when your taking over the driving seat. Some of you will become business leaders!
So, we arrive at the year of Our Lord, twenty-twenty, somewhat breathless because of these awful Grit-out® masks everyone's wearing these days. Tele-working hasn't caught on and we're still all traipsing into the office through life-leeching traffic fumes and dust storms. Some of the older staff can still remember blue skies. The only real difference for us commuters of the 20's is that those dreadful, old, rickety 1990's railcars have been scrapped. The tracks, too!
There's been a revolution in your office, as well. You have your own knowledge control centre, in the managerial suite. Just outside it, sit your secretaries and operators, though they might as well be in the room beside you because they know as much about the network as you. Maybe more! But you must have an office if only because you need a door on which to hang your name-plate: "Director of Information Strategy" (DIS).
You have always been a little disappointed with the title. Outside the company no-one's quite sure what it means. You didn't like "Director and Information Architect" and "Director of Information Management" wouldn't do. You spotted the trap in that acronym! You approved "Director of Records Management" (DoRM), and started using it. But, then that Papeete office re-organisation audio came in and no-one noticed, until the Board presentation, that some smart-ass Francophone was singing in the background: "Dormez vous? Dormez vous?" The chairman nearly fell off his Postur-plinth®.
In the past two decades, yours and every other successful organisation has had to re-build its commercial processes to cope with the speed of business transactions and the volume of information that deluges it from all over the globe. Knowledge management (KM) has been standardised. The ISO papers provided that impetus, and your predecessors, the records managers at the turn of the century, put the company competencies in place by enforcing the codes of practice. The software, grandchildren of RIIM and CAIN®, or Able-PRoTIME®, now handles 99 per cent of the workflow, retention and archiving.
You must keep that process running smoothly, properly maintained and amended to keep up with the changes in work processes, new projects, new personnel, new technology and new language. You have a monthly meeting with the software programmers, face-to-face at least once a year if you all have time, on the video conference link otherwise. As a middle-rank company director, you attend board meetings every Tuesday morning to present the Doc. Sys. Apps. (DSA) report from your information technicians and Information Workflow (IW) report from the KM staff.
You'd like to get rid of this report terminology because it causes a lot of unpleasantness between the departments. The bright-heads have invented slanderous variants. The technicians complain about the "I Want" department, and the KM staff fume over the "dossers" or the "Do-Sod-All" technicians. You almost had a riot on your hands at your DIS meeting earlier in the year when Pic-Store head shouted at the Chief Software Engineer (CSE): "You write the D.S.A. Well, bloody Do Something About it!"
But the chairman understands them and reads them with a sharp eye. You get flayed by His Lordship when any trading figures are poor. "What happened! We needed those Bosnia pollution figures before that Sarajevo clearance contract. Cost us a couple a billion!" That sort of thing. Tiresome!
However, it's not all bad news. Your new Telecoms deputy has been a huge success. Very bright girl! Her appointment was a massive step forward. Satellite circuits, crystal-optic laser links, neural I-chips, she's got them all at her finger tips. Privately, you are a bit hazy about some of the new technology, but suffice to say the intra-networks have been running faultlessly since she took over.
Best of all, those awful real-time maintenance up-dates are working perfectly, now. The trouble you've had with them! The engineers insist on keeping the lines open "in case something comes in", causing some sort of analogue jam, Telecoms says, and that X.6300 ISO telcom code was the very devil to comply with unless you kept on the case. ISO keeps up-dating it.
Your CSE's Rec-Sec routines are absolutely crucial, of course, and under constant review. Last year, the IT-Sec group discovered the Great Brain Robbery. Well, that's what the staff called it, even though THEY didn't get away with very much at all. But THEY cut their way through the hacking "fire-beta blox" - the term "firewalls" lost creditability after those Asia-Pacific digital RAM-raiders torched their way into the Banco del Universado virtu-vaults in 2012 - and the company confi-digital registry would have been cleaned out but for your IT-See® vigilantes. The directorate earned a whole bunch of Brownie points for that!
That old computer-aided drawing (CAD) software will have to be replaced soon. It still makes beautifully accurate diagrams and the old CAD-hands prefer it, but the new holographic CADs and the 3D-digital (3-DD) store are producing much more exciting work in the architectural and engineering departments. With the latest virtual reality modelling language-based software, V.R.M.L-evate®, you can "walk through" the design to check if the condominium light switches are accessible, for instance, or see if the lights work, for that matter! It's not surprising that none of those bumptious young designers wants to use the old CAD seats anymore.
You were right not to get rid of that Worldweb Information Locator Service (WILS) archivist. She's been able to spend the last six weeks brushing up on the WILSwift® software processes. It's so fast, that even she's having difficulty keeping up and she's an honours master in advanced archive applications, an M-Triple A. Not too many of them about, even now-a-days.
This new WILS gives you a big, new indexing problem, but the holograms ... ghastly! You warned the Design Director at the 2019 review brain-storming, but he blithely said: "Oh, you can fix it, can't you?" So you have to! One of the dangers is that the visual concepts key-words index just can't keep up with the architects' dreaming spires visions or towering nightmares, or what-ever you call them!
Problems with indexing video and audio reports are bad enough. So much new "work-speak", and those homonyms! You cannot get home to those Kiwi salesmen that they've got to be more careful with pronunciation of "pin" and "pen", or, worse, "cow" and "car".
You got the real horrors when you heard an audio-appraisal by that young Waikato clerk in transport talking about his Lordship's vintage Rolls Royce Silver Wraith as "the chairman's old car". Make's your hair stand on end. Imagine if the phondex-algorithm heard "old cow" and the vernacular synonym association mistook that for Lady S. Crickey! Then the abuse block would kick in and out-put the auto-report straight onto his Lordship's table. It doesn't bear thinking about!
The problem of textual homonyms was solved by that amazing indexer ... what's-his-name? ... ten years ago or so. Contextual associations. Gets something like 99.4% accuracy. You worry about that 0.6% sometimes, but it doesn't seem to matter. At least, no-one's noticed anything wrong. Yet! ... But the holographs are a whole different war game.
Wednesdays is Training Group. It's become a bit of a euphemism, that. It's more a brain-bleach group ... you know, blank it out, re-program! The records management system shows up most of the errors, but it's incredibly expensive to put them right manually. Better to stop it at source. New staff are all right. They've had records-keeping rammed down their throats since kindergarten. But the older, senior people still think they know better. They usually do their workflow schedules okay, but then they forget the copyright rules or the temp time-outs - that's a real pain - or the PC purge at the end of the day. Some of them have to be reminded every single day. No wonder Training Group gets cynical, but thank goodness his Lordship's so hot on it!
Which reminds you. You must talk to the Text-Store head to make sure the policy statement the Chairman's working on gets the right Retention Sched. The good Baron has never really liked his PC Records-Set key, and he thinks all his words are immortal, anyway!
Sometime or other you have got to finish that study on copyright in the company archive. A recent Supreme Court judgement on the Fraud Act, 2017, has raised serious doubts on the legality of storing Imaginart® computer-aided graphic re-constructs. And, the new amendment to the Private Information Act, 2004, seems to mean that staff personal files are infringements. Something about dates of birth being privileged. Seems silly, but the Complement Director's having fifty fits.
That Information Disaster Recovery (IDR) planning meeting will just have to be put back to next week. The paper group hasn't come up with the right answers on mail scanning when the postroom gets the next letter bomb. They still can't guarantee IDR in less than ninety minutes. You know how many claims and vouchers arrive in that time!
Strategic Crown Information Management: Yes, you have got to get that survey off to the Minister of Commerce. After the company re-doubled its turnover following your strategic information plan implementation, the Government wants to get in on the secret. The Minister thinks it would help if "just-in-time" information got on MPs' monitors in the House. Huh!
It's been terribly difficult to get Government to understand electronic information applications. The Prime Minister is still using a fountain pen, for goodness sake! The National Archive is 100% electronic. No more paper to be preserved, that's the rule, not even the PM's scribblings. Meta-data is preserved, of course, but those data migration routines ….. so slow! Takes 24 hours to re-mount the archive each time! And it's only 900 bibliobytes!
Thank goodness the President's office is more up to date. She doesn't mess about with pen and ink. She's used electronic signatures for all legislation ever since she get into power last year. Insisted on it!
The Minister of Justice wants to see you. The Peoples' Evidence Act needs updating. There's so much on audio-video media and distance conferencing Top-DAT® tapes, now. You've got to give that some thought before the end of the week. Full-text audio searches are still not good. Homonyms again! And the Ministry visual concepts key-words index needs tweaking.
Rumour is, Treasury found a Prosecution Office skin-flick in the city reports last week. The context algorithms should have spotted it but the phondex must have mixed up the bears and bares. What a fuss!
Fade out ...
I could go on. You think I'm being too fanciful? Don't you believe it. It will all happen, something like that. Some of it already has.
Remember those high-flying job advertisements at the beginning of my paper? I didn't invent those. They were taken off the Internet this year. I have changed only minor facts - and the salary levels - to amuse you and avoid offending the real advertisers. And leading companies in the United Kingdom and the United States are giving their heads of information services direct responsibility to their board of directors.
I've not been talking just about the future.
The future is here, now. It's up to us whether we become the Information Boomers or stand back for others to pick up the challenge. There are plenty of professionals out there who would just love to get the chance.
 "The Archives of the University of Cambridge" |
(1) Heather E. Peek, M.A. and Catherine P. Hall, M.A., The Archives of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.10, 1962.
(2) Luciana Duranti and Heather MacNeil, The Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records: A study by the University of British Columbia - Master of Archival Studies group http://www.slais.ubc.ca/users/duranti/index.htm, May 1997.
(3) Jean Samuel, Records Manager, Pfizer Central Research, Kent, England, "Jean Samuel Shocks Pharmacy Group with E-mail Armageddon Vision", Records and Information Management On-line Service (RIMOS), Web page http://www.caldeson.com/RIMOS/samuel.html, 1995.
(4) Richard E. Barry, President, Barry Associates, U.S. E.R.M. consultancy, Catching the Multimedia Intranet Train Before it Leaves the Station" (later renamed "Catching Up with the Last Technology Train at the Next Station"), Web page http://www.mybestdocs.com/febrb2.html, 1996.
(5) Josette Mathers, "Using the Intranet", Informaa Quarterly, Queensland: Records Management Association of Australia, vol.13, no.1, pp.8-14, February 1997.
(6) Per Hjerppe, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Internet director for Asia and the Pacific , Auckland: National Business Weekly, May 2, 1997.
(6a) Geoffrey Axton, Concert Telecommunications vice president for commercial and Internet services, "Concert man sees hallmarks of goldrush fever in Internet hype", N.Z. Infotech Weekly, p.7, August 13, 1997.
(7) International Data Corporation (IDC) research group, Internet census, 1997.
(8) Richard E. Barry, Managing Organisations with Electronic Records, RIMOS Web page http://www.caldeson/RIMOS/barry2.html, 1993.
(9) AGB McNair Internet survey, 1996.
(10) The Dominion, Wellington, April, 1997.
(11) Forbes ASAP journal, October 5, 1995.
(12) University of Washington's Human Genome Project, http://www.genome.washington.edu/UWGC/tutorial/default.htm, funded by Microsoft founder, Bill Gates.
(13) Australian Standard© Records Management, Part 2: Responsibilities, p.3, Sydney, NSW: Standards Australia, AS4390 (set of six parts). Price $AU75.00, February 1996.
(14) Australian Standard© Records Management, Part 3: Strategies, p.4.
(15) Code of Practice for Legal Admissibility of Information Stored on Electronic Document Management Systems, London: British Standards Institution, DISC PD 0008, Price: £19.50, February 1996.
(16) Compliance Workbook for use with PD0008, Peter Howes and Alan Shipman, London: British Standards Institution, DISC PD0009, November 1996.
(17) Principles of Good Practice for Information Management, Bill Mayon-White and Bernard Dyer, London: British Standards Institution, DISC PD0010 version 2, price: £25, 1997.
(18) General Records Disposal Schedules: Details of books (prices: $AU13 or $AU30) and disks (prices: $AU20) available from the Archives Authority of New South Wales. Details on http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/publicsector/rk/manual.htm or from The Publications Officer, Archives Authority of New South Wales, Level 3, 66 Harrington Street, The Rocks, Sydney, NSW 2000. Tel: +61 (0)2 9237 0137; fax: +61 (0)2 9237 0142.
(19) "Knowledge management: the third "era" of the information age?", by Guy St. Clair, InfoManage, New York: SMR International, vol.3, no.10, September 1996.
(20) Electronic Records Policy, Wellington: National Archives of New Zealand, p.35, February 1997.
Ardern, Christine. cardern@netcom.ca
Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA). http://www.arma.org/hq/
Barry, Richard ("Rick") E. rickbarry@aol.com
British Standards Institution (BSI). http://www.bsi.org.uk/
Contec Data Systems. http://www.contecds.com/
Dyer, Bernard W. ("Bernie") b.w.dyer@lse.ac.uk
Duranti, Luciana. luciana@interchange.ubc.ca
GMB Solutions Pty. Ltd. http://www.gmb.com.au/
Gränström, Claes. claes.granstrom@riksarkivet.ra.se
Hare, Catherine. catherine.hare@unn.ac.uk
Hoff, Brand. brand@towersoft.com.au
Image and Document Management Association (IDMA). http://www.ins-data-mgmt.org/home.html
Jones, Philip ("Phil") A. philip.jones@staffordshire.gov.uk
Keenan, Hayley. hayley.keenan@dicomgroup.com
London School of Economics and Political Science. http://www.lse.ac.uk/
Mathers, Josette. jmathers@echidna.id.au
Mayon-White, W. M. ("Bill"). w.m.mayon-white@lse.ac.uk
Moldrich, David. david.moldrich@aus.xerox.com
National Archives of New Zealand. http://www.archives.dia.govt.nz
North, Alison. aisnorth@compuserve.com
Records Management Association of Australia (RMAA). http://www.rmaa.com.au
Records Management Society of Great Britain (RMS). http://www.rms-gb.org.uk/
Ridley, Ken. kridley@fish.wa.gov.au
Samuel, Jean. jean.samuel@btinternet.com
Standards Australia. http://www.standards.org.au
Steemson, Michael ("Mike") J. steemson@caldeson.com
Tower Software Engineering Pty. Ltd. http://www.towersoft.com.au
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 Michael Steemson |