Records management principles and practice

Julie McLeod gave us a fascinating insight into what's happening in the academic world. It's great to hear that there are projects going on that treat our discpline with the (growing) respect it needs and deserves.


Juile pointed out that we live in a world of increasing complexity, contradiction and ambiguity; diversity and interconectedness. And in this fast dynamic, agile world records management still has to make its way but not without challenges, principles and best practice.


Challenges. The challenges for Julie are around ICTs, the legal framework within which we operate, updating our knowledge and skills to keep abreast of changes, the human and organisational elements that shape us, all within our records management requirements. We all want seemingly contradictory things; faster response times but a better work life balance. Do we need to adapt our rm practices?


Principles what records are, what they represent? What is records management? Principles are borrowed from other systems and we've developed them.



Practice what is best practice? Standards/guidance/tools/toolkits


We need to develop all these elements into a coherent whole so we can move forward into the records management future we all are trying to shape / influence / develop.


Julie also noted the work going on with three particular projects; InterPARES, the clever metadata project and espida

InterPARES is looking at the reliability and authenticity of erecords including long term digital preservation.

Clever metadata project is looking at how metadata is created once but used many times, particularly looking at that metadata for which there is no need for people to add themselves.

espida was a project for managing intangible benefits and included looking at the value of information. The main outcome is a blueprint for making a business case, balanced scorecards. Two real case studies have been sucessful.

All of these projects were designed to look to the future not the past. And when we do that, it's important to note that there are three dimensions to take into account ... principles, perspectives and players.

Northumbria University has done two witness seminars...exploring the essence of records management /examining the issues and challenges of email.

The ACerm project is concentrating on the accelerating pace of change in ERM. It is perhaps, the first ever RM project looking at evidence-based outputs and its work will, therefore, be valuable and important.

There are two PhDs being undertaken in the area in investigating risk and erm and continued communications.

The links between the principles, perspectives and players in records management will give us results which are powerful and (post?) modern, enabling us to move the profession forward into the 21st century.

I found this to be a compelling tale of how principles and practice can interact, interlink and drive positive change.