The Records Management Society and An Archivist: A Japanese story of Unrequited Love
| Published date | 01 February 1991 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb060906 |
| Pages | 63-66 |
| Date | 01 February 1991 |
| Author | Chiyoko Ogawa |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
The Records Management Society
and An Archivist: A Japanese story
of Unrequited Love
Chiyoko Ogawa
No link with Archives
No Japanese records management colleagues can forget the name of Mr.
William Benedon. He, the former President of IRMC, took the key role to push
the establishment of the Japanese Records Management Society by presenting
the first comprehensive records management textbook Records Management
System in Japanese in 1988.
In the literature he wrote that "Records Management is the systematic
control of information and records from their creation, whatever the format
might be, through their maintenance both in the active and inactive area, to
their final disposition by disposal or archival preservation."
These words hit me greatly. There was much literature on records and
documents management before Mr. Benedon's book in Japan, but his work was
the first one which clearly described that records management covers records'
entire lives, even to their final disposal or archival preservation.
Dr. Shuichi Yasuzawa and Mr. Masahito Ando, in an article, summarized
our records management understanding as follows:
Despite her long history of creating records, Japan has been negligent in
developing modern systems for records and archives, and has been too
ignorant of the current situation in other countries. It may be true that
archival development cannot be promoted unless the people themselves are
enthusiastic about the preservation of archives as part of their own national
heritage. ("Japanese Archives at the Dawn of a New Age," Information
Development, vol.4, no.l, Jan. 1988, 36)
As it is seen in the above cited paragraph, it is our general understanding that
records management (sometimes "documents management") has no essential link
with archival preservation. Hence old records which have reached their retention
period have usually been mechanically disposed of and immediately destroyed.
Nor With Current Records
A group of lecturers from University College London visited Japan in January
1989 with the purpose of observing Japanese records and archives manage-
ment. Anne Morddel reported on this visit in the Records Management
Quarterly, July 1989. In her article "A visit to Japan" we see that they could
hardly find out any active records management system as she expected.
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