Electronic records management… the way we were … the way we are: one man's opinion
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Pages | 157-189 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb027110 |
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| Author | RICHARD E. BARRY |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
OPINION
PIECE
Electronic records management...
the way we were ... the way we
are:
one man's opinion
RICHARD E. BARRY
It is the rage in the literature today for archivists and records managers
to address the issue of recordkeeping in The New Millennium. It is an
idea that must be worthy of
its
own acronym, TNM. It has a nice, seduc-
tive ring to it that gives one the sense of joining the ranks of the pundits
and visionaries. This author has succumbed like all of the
others.1
And I
know I'll do it again - soon. I can't wait. At my age, when one begins
to get the idea that it might be the last chance one will have to talk about
a TNM, it is downright irresistible. One has to bleed it for all it is worth.
However tempting it may be, we do not need to do a great deal of spec-
ulating about TNM. It is looking us in the eye right now, in the sense
that what it will be like at the beginning of TNM is going to reflect in
many ways the reality of today's world and our current planning,
research, development and implementation activities. Therefore, in the
remainder of this opinion piece, I will reflect on certain aspects of the
past 10 years of progress in the field of electronic records to see how we
have become what we are today and reassure ourselves that we need not
be disappointed about that; and I will offer opinions on the way we are
today and how that frames many of the issues of the future without call-
ing upon punditry or even much vision.
Records Management Journal, vol 7, no. 3, December 1997, pp 157-189
Records Management Journal
vol.
7
no.
3
The way we were
After having accepted the invitation to contribute to this year's ambi-
tious international edition of the Records Management Journal with an
opinion piece on the status of electronic records, and reflecting with
some horror what I had agreed to do, I was thinking about a simple and
interesting way to share my views on where we have come with electronic
records in the past 10 years. I was reminded of an email exchange I had
in May 1996 with Glenda Acland. She had a very interesting approach
for a paper she was working on to present to the Australian Society of
Archivists at its 1996 Annual Conference in Alice Springs. She had been
asked to give a paper "on observations of the state of play with elec-
tronic records management (ERM) from my last trip [to North
America],
but which I am trying to update to make it more interesting."2
She asked several international colleagues who were active in discussions
and agenda setting in electronic records in research and development,3
including me, to briefly express their views on the subject, and she con-
solidated those views in her paper. I thought: what a clever idea: this
may be one of the first applications of "knowledge management" in an
opinion paper on electronic records research and development! Portions
of the remainder of this paper draw from and amplify upon the few
paragraphs in my reply to Glenda Acland.4
Reflecting on what it was like when I first became involved in the field
of electronic records only ten years ago and what things are like now
helps me to better understand the way we are today. Fixing on the way
we are, in the context of the way we were only a decade ago, also gives
me a better perspective on realistic ways that we might strengthen the
way we now are. Admittedly, ten years isn't a very long time. I was a rel-
ative new comer to the electronic records field in 1987, as archivists and
records managers were writing about machine-readable records going
back at least as far as the 1960s, at which time I was just beginning a
career in information management and technology. It would take me
over 25 years to discover that that had much to do with records man-
agement. Nonetheless, the last decade is probably the most important
one so far with respect to electronic records, because of the defining
political, economic and technological events that have taken place dur-
ing this period that have great bearing on recordkeeping in an electronic
environment.
Because I believe it tells a good deal about our community more gener-
ally, and because it was so interesting and is a story that hasn't been told
before so far as I am aware, I will express my views by telling a thumb-
nail story about my baptism in ERM, and the baptism of several of our
colleagues, that is also one person's footnote on the history of the exper-
ience. In September 1987,I became chairperson of the inter-agency, inter-
disciplinary United Nations Advisory Committee for the Co-ordination
158
December 1997 Electronic records management
of Information Systems (ACCIS)5 Technical Panel on Electronic
Records Management (TP/REM). The Panel consisted of 20 members
from 12 regular and specialized agencies of the UN,6 one observer and
two consultants. It produced a report that was later published as a soft-
bound book
Managing Electronic
Records:
Issues
and
Guidelines.1
What was the first issue for this worldly group? It was a very earthy one
to be sure - pun intended. The group was a mix of archives and records
management (ARM) and information technology (IT) professionals,
representing many nationalities and many UN agencies, that were phys-
ically located in various European and North American cities, plus two
consultants and one observer from the US National Archives and
Records Administration's technology unit. With these demographics,
and a very limited budget, it seemed clear to me from the outset that the
bulk of the project would somehow have to be conducted in small
groups and largely over e-mail. I naively proposed that approach at the
Panel's opening plenary meeting only to discover that virtually none of
the ARM professionals had personal computers, let alone access to or
any experience with e-mail. I thus made the following challenge to that
part of the group: how could we possibly expect to credibly contribute
to the development of ERM guidelines if we wouldn't know an elec-
tronic record were we to stumble over one in the dark of night? Or
should we simply sit back and let the IT members of the group and the
consultants figure it out for us? I suggested that these participants use
this challenge to shame their organizations into providing them with a
PC and a modem. The point was well taken and acted upon.
Through various, sometimes nefarious means, the Panel's ARM mem-
bers acquired PCs. At that time, as chief of information services in the
World Bank, I was beta testing an office system developed by Action
Technologies, Inc. (ATI), of
Alameda,
California, called The Coordinator
System™8 that integrated various work coordination tools including cal-
endaring and e-mail using what was possibly the first desktop e-mail sys-
tem. That meant that all document creation and composition of outgoing
e-mail messages (em) and the reading of incoming EMs, was done off
line on a PC rather than by necessity on-line on a host computer and,
where applicable, over very expensive long-distance phone connections.
The Coordinator seemed like the ideal vehicle for the TP/REM project
and, through the generosity of ATI, we obtained sufficient free loaner
copies for all TP/REM participants who didn't already have access to e-mail.
Within only a couple of months, these ARM members who were new to
IT became experienced in the creation of electronic records to carry out
the business of the project team. They also began to gain a deeper under-
standing and appreciation of the emerging world of ERM, made sub-
stantive contributions to the work of the group and critically assessed
the work of the Panel's excellent consultants. The ARM members of the
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