Wednesday 22 August 2007

Beyond compliance - the future of records managment

Update the journal of CILIP has published an article of mine in their latest edition entitled 'Beyond compliance - the future of records management' as its cover story.

The paper looks at the compliance-based origins of records management and how we may struggle to fulfil this core objective in the future unless we are willing to see the limitations inherent in current practice.

As ever all thoughts and comments are welcome...

Tuesday 21 August 2007

JISC infoNet Innovation in Records Management Award

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my concerns that despite its growth in recent years, the records management profession seems to have lost some of its desire to innovate and to find new solutions to both old and new problems.

It was partially to help recognise, reward and encourage those bucking this trend in the UK Higher and Further Education sectors that JISC infoNet have today announced the launch of the inaugral JISC infoNet Innovation in Records & Information Award sponsored by Facet Publishing.

We also hope that this award and especially the intention to make publicly available the content of the nominations we receive may itself play a small part in helping to stimulate further research and development in the future.

If you and your project meet the criteria we look forward to receiving your nomination!!

Thursday 16 August 2007

Records Management Witness Seminar

Readers of ths blog may well be interested in an event being run in Newcastle this October. This is the second time Professor Julie McLeod has run a Records Management Witness Seminar, the first being one of the most innovative and stimulating records management events I have been part of. This second event, focused around email and e-communications looks equally as interesting.


2nd Northumbria University Witness Seminar Conference

Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications
Exploring strategies with Experts
at
St James Park, Newcastle upon Tyne
24-25th October 2007

"Email has transformed business but it can be a nightmare" … and instant messaging, skype etc are set to do the same thing! But are we successfully managing the information created by these technologies?

Join a group of records management, IT, management and legal experts, from the UK, Australia & Canada abroad, and engage in the exploration of key issues for managing records from email and other e-communications technologies. Contribute your own knowledge and experience to the debate as we examine:

· the business perspective - what are the records management implications & challenges of doing business electronically?
· the people perspective – are people the problem and the solution?
· the technology perspective - problem or panacea?
· moving forward – futurewatch.

If you want to develop a strategy for tackling email and position your organisation to manage its records in today’s highly distributed, mobile environment then this is the event for you.

The one and a half-day conference builds on the success of our first ‘witness seminar conference’ in May 2006. The three ‘witness seminars’ and a panel discussion offer a rare opportunity for anyone interested and/or involved in managing their organisation’s email/e-communications records to listen, learn from, actively discuss and network with a broad range of experts and other delegates.

‘Witnesses’ include: Steve Bailey, David Bowen, a partner form Crutes Law Firm, Adrian Cunningham (National Archives of Australia), Jonathan Downes, Ishbel Duncan, Catherine Hare, Mike Huberty, Heather Jack, John McDonald (Canada), Michael Moss, Martin Sanderson, Zoe Smyth, David Wainwright, Geoff Walker, Teresa Waring, Ian Wooler.

The conference fee is £300 (includes lunch and refreshments both days, an evening event at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and conference proceedings on publication). For booking and detailed information of the event, which is being sponsored by Iron Mountain (UK) Ltd and Emerald Publishing, please visit the conference website at www.northumbria.ac.uk/rmwitness07

Early booking is advisable as places are limited to 50 delegates.

Friday 3 August 2007

Defining 'Records Management 2.0'

In a previous post I mentioned that I am speaking on the subject of the need for Records Management2.0 in response to the changes we are seeing in the use of ICT thanks to Web2.0. Well my thoughts on this same concept and why I believe it is now required are also described in an article and Podcast for the lastest JISC Inform magazine.

As readers of this blog will know I have written and presented fairly extensively over recent months on the challenges posed by the rise of Web2.0 and Office2.0 and why I believe the records management profession needs to address them. What I plan to do now is to start to move beyond this - after all, it's no good just repeating that we have a problem unless we then start to work out what we might do about it! I certainly wouldn't claim to have all the answers, or even to yet fully understand all the questions but as the classic saying goes ' the journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step' - so I guess it is time to lace up the boots.

For me the journey starts in Belfast with a paper at the end of this month at the Society of Archivist's Annual Conference where I hope to map out some of the main themes and approaches open to us. I'll be making the content of this paper available online afterwards so will provide a link to it in due course. In the meantime it would be great to hear the thoughts of others as to how records management may adapt to meet these challenges, or indeed if you disagree with the need to reinvent it at all!