AC+erm at the RMS Conference

We were delighted to have been given the opportunity of speaking about the AC+erm Project at last month’s Records Management Society Conference in Brighton. Thanks and praise are due to the conference organizer, Heather Jack, not only for giving us a captive audience but also for putting together such a varied and interesting mix of topics and speakers. It was a very good conference, with a definite air of purpose and confidence among delegates.

The talk given on behalf of the team by Rachel Hardiman was included in the ‘Transformation and Change’ strand of the conference. Entitled Transformation through research? The AC+erm project, it is now available in a slightly amended form on our project website at http://tinyurl.com/q3xw2h. (You can see a list of all the presentations we have given on the project, most of them with accompanying slides, at http://tinyurl.com/qa579n.)

One aspect of the conference that was particularly heartening for us was the strong showing from the academic side of our discipline. As well as AC+erm and Elizabeth Lomas’ Continued Communication project from Northumbria, there were sessions run by colleagues from Glasgow and Aberystwyth Universities, and the AC+erm presentation was ably and genially chaired by Alan Bell of Dundee University. It was heartening not simply because it provided a wider audience for research work but because I believe that it marks a significant step on the road towards a real and exciting synergy between theory and practice.

Although the pressure of time (we are now deep into our final Delphi study on the systems and technology facet of ERM) does not allow for a comprehensive or even an impressionistic review of the conference, I’d like to highlight two sessions which made an impact for quite different reasons.

The first was Heather Brooke’s opening keynote address on freedom of information. Heather is a crusading journalist of the classic type, who is largely responsible for lifting the lid off the unsavoury cauldron of the MPs’ expenses issue. Her impassioned and solidly argued demands for openness and accountability in the public realm – and her comparisons between the expectation of these in the US and the secrecy and obfuscation built into the system here in the UK – reminded us that we are only the stewards and not the controllers of the information that passes through our hands. We have societal as well as career and professional obligations, and should never forget that the information and records held by public bodies are the property of citizens not the state bureaucracy, and that public servants should be just that.

The second was a very different affair, and in fact a session which I stumbled upon by accident, as my first choice was full by the time I tried to book a place. Under the title ‘Don’t forget about the structure in the EDRM’ – which fooled everybody, since it in fact referred to the other EDRM – Courtney Fletcher and Liam Ferguson from Mesirow Financial Consulting gave an informative, breezy and entertaining presentation on the need to consider structured data systems when engaged in electronic discovery (yes, that ED). The reason I choose to highlight it is that it came as a useful reminder that so much RIM activity is focused on unstructured information that it is easy to forget that many business-critical records actually take the form of data in structured systems, even if they do not conform to the ‘correct’ definitions of records according to the manuals and standards.

All in all, April’s conference must be marked down as a success for the RMS, and left many looking forward already to next year’s, which will take place in Manchester.