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 206 SUE MCKEMMISH YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW 207

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 1999 | | pagina 105