Yesterday and today
In recent years highly successful collaborative partnerships have been built in the
records continuum in Australia, particularly in the areas of electronic record
keeping, standards development, and professional and continuing education.
Two outstanding examples of standards development are provided by the
Australian Records Management Standard, and the National Records and
Archives Competency Standards. Australian Standard AS 4390, the first national
records management standard in the world, now under development as an inter
national standard, resulted from collaborative work by records managers, archi
vists and standard setters. Cast in a records continuum framework, AS 4390
provides a voluntary code of practice for recordkeeping. The Records and
Archives Competency Standards were also developed within a continuum frame
work. Like the Australian Records Management Standard, the Competency
Standards recognise that recordkeeping is a critical function performed through
the collective action of employees and systems throughout all organisations.
According to this scenario, everyone is a recordkeeper, while records managers
and archivists are society's recordkeeping specialists:
Of the 8.38 million people currently in work in Australia, it is safe to say that
almost all of them are required to keep records of some sort. There are,
however, a group of people and organisations for whom working with records
and archives is core business.
The Project therefore sought and was granted cross-industry status, which means
that the competency standards developed apply to all recordkeeping work,
regardless of who performs it. Thus they attempt to define not only the
competencies of records managers and archives, but what constitutes record
keeping in our society.
These two initiatives have built a strong foundation for continuing collabora
tive action in relation to standard setting that brings together in a coherent way
current, historical and regulatory perspectives on recordkeeping.
Tomorrow
The phenomenal proliferation of document-like information objects (DIOs)
on the Internet and other global networks has caught the information
professions, and almost everyone else napping. Within a scant three years
(1993-1996), the Internet has expanded exponentially, inspired clones of
itself and evolved from being an arena dominated by the IT elite to become a
'no limits' Information Smorgasbord where anyone can create and make a
DIO instantly available to billions of consumers. Once created and posted on
the Net, an individual DIO becomes a free-floating commodity. In the
absence of a regime of standards and protocols guaranteeing its provenance,
quality, integrity, transparency and accessibility, its retrievability, reliability
and value can not be assured, and it can be used, copied, cannibalised and/or
exploited without acknowledging or compensating its originator.
(Ann Pederson, April 1997)
A high priority area for the immediate future is to work with IT professionals,
librarians, information managers, cultural heritage players and other stake
holders in the development of coherent information architecture and metadata
specifications within or across organisations or jurisdictions to support docu
ment management, discovery and delivery in electronic networked environ
ments. In particular the Australian recordkeeping profession needs to engage in
international efforts to build an infrastructure of rules and standards in the
virtual world equivalent to the regimes which manage recorded information of
all kinds in the paper world. As in other standard setting endeavours, the records
continuum provides a powerful framework for developing appropriate input
from the recordkeeping profession.
In today's electronic networked environments, records are managed along
with an expanding array of other information resources. In networked environ
ments information resources need to be adequately identified, authenticated,
and quality rated. They need to be readily accessible and retrievable for as long as
they are required, then to be disposed of in a systematic way. Terms and condi
tions of access and disposition need to be managed and monitored. Effective
control of all of these document-like information objects or DIOs depends upon
authoritative metadata-accurate information which specifies their structure,
content, context and essential management requirements - being embedded
within, wrapped around or otherwise persistently linked to each individual DIO
DE PROFESSIE
3D Organise
information managers
IT managers
corporate librarians
FOI officers
auditors
corporate lawyers
CEOs/senior managers
financial controllers
work process re-engineers
1D/2D Create/Capture
operational managers
IT operational staff
systems administrators
supervisors
desktop operators
It can also help clarify potential strategic alliances in relation to activities associated with the
different dimensions, eg
3D/4D Organise/Pluralise
Working with FOI officers, auditors, legal officers, senior managers, watchdogs and
regulatory authorities to ensure recordkeeping supports corporate and democratic accounta
bility requirements
Working with information managers, IT professionals and librarians to develop coherent infor
mation architecture and metadata specifications within or across organisations or jurisdic
tions to support document discovery and delivery in electronic networked environments
3D Organise
Working with policy makers, managers and business process designers
to integrate recordkeeping and business processes
Working with IT managers to promote the development and takeup of information and com
munication technology supportive of recordkeeping requirements in the organisation
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SUE MCKEMMISH YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW
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