2008 marks the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the RMS, and the Society will be marking this with a landmark event. This year we have enlisted the help of conference specialists, Benchmark Communications.
The Conference has always been famed as a friendly and very social gathering, where debate ranges freely in conference sessions, in breaks and in convivial evening gatherings. This year we look forward to an extensive programme, innovative exhibition and a fun packed social programme.
I urge you to take advantage of the early bird registration rate and book your place today. I look forward to seeing you in Edinburgh.
Dr Paul DullerRMS Chair
5 comments:
Hi Red Kite
well done getting this going. looking forward to much traffic and interesting comments
Hi Red Kite
Well done! - I'm looking forward to hearing what our members think of the conference programme, and to the Event itself. Edinburgh is one of my all time favourite cities and is an excellent venue for our 25th Birthday celebrations!
The conference programme includes some interesting sessions. The focus on Sharepoint will, I think, stimulate much discussion.
When mentioning the conference to some of my colleagues within the pharmaceutical industry, there was a general opinion however that the agenda was too heavily focussed on the public sector, particularly local and central government. Now, this may be because a higher proportion of the RMS membership is from those areas or that this is simply where individuals volunteered to do presentations. And, I know how extremely difficult (and thankless!) a task organising a conference is. Of course, just because a case study is from a particular sector, it doesn't mean there is no applicability to other sectors. Just thought it worth mentioning though... the observation has been made ;-)
A rant from an OLD Records Manager
It is ironic that 25 years ago when the Society was founded by the private sector very few public sector people were interested. The RMS has always focussed on what is current on the RM agenda and certainly in the last few years the focus has been on all things governmental / public. The private sector seems to have faded away a little. Is this because industries such as oil and gas / pharmaceutical are "sorted" and have been for some time after all it was the oil & gas sector (a storage company)that initiated the foundation of the RMS in 1983 with a few private sector employees. Right now the financial services sector / food and drink and others are taking an interest in RM and re-inventing the wheel because they don't know enough about us, if anything at all. I don't think we should be concerned about the conference public / private focus as all the topics are relevant to both, the case studies may be different but in my 36 years as a Records Manager the challenges are always the same - too much paper - disinterested management - low profile - no money - tricky technology - file classification - retention - I could go on - and the solutions, a variation of a similar theme with innovative use of technology. Some of us have broken into different, connected but not specifically RM areas such as Info Security / Information Rights / Business Continuity etc but again differeces between public / private sector matters not. What is of concern to me is that in the 25 years the Society has existed we seem to have become "foggy" unclear in purpose, confused as to what our aim is, no review to see if we are achieving anything, moving uneasily from year to year, jumping onto the latest band-wagon in an attempt to create a permanent identity. In 1983 we were much clearer about our purpose, yes it was all about paper file management and archiving but we banded together to create a professional approach to this work. Perhaps now once again we should concentrate more on our purpose than the differences in focus between public and private sector.
Well it sounds like RMS has a marketing job to do with the private sector.
I wonder if it's true to say that the public sector are more likely to work together and share information than the private sector. Competition and collaboration are unlikely bedfellows.
The RMS may need to look at its core business objectives and how it reaches out to organisations in order to meet them.
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