Final AC+erm Colloquium – Witness Seminar

Last Thursday (5th March), we held the last in our series of project colloquia as a Witness Seminar called Transforming Information & Records Management through Research & Development. A group of 50 delegates and witnesses discussed and debated the links and synergies, actual and desired, between research and practice in the field of Records and Information Management.

The event was structured around three sessions – two seminars led by panels of expert ‘witnesses’, and a forum for general discussion. Witnesses for the first seminar panel were drawn from the academic world, and for the second, from the practitioner world; each panel was introduced by chairs from the ‘opposite’ arena. After the witnesses delivered their statements in each seminar, the discussion was opened to delegates. The final session was devoted purely to discussion and thought about future directions of research in recordkeeping.

The constitution of the panels was as follows:

Seminar 1 – The transforming capacity of research & development: Academic perspectives
Chair: Adrian Cunningham
Witnesses: Steve Bailey; Sue Childs; Elizabeth Lomas; Dr Alison Pickard

Seminar 2 – The transforming capacity of research & development: Practitioner perspectives
Chair: Catherine Hare
Witnesses: Dr David Bowen; Chris Campbell; Maria Luisa Di Biagio; Paul Dodgson; John McDonald; Andrew Snowden

Discussion
Chair: Prof Michael Moss

While we were very fortunate to have such eminent academics and practitioners to lead the event, the Witness Seminar format – with its emphasis on discussion as well as ‘talking heads’ – meant that a considerable portion of the colloquium’s success arose from the contributions made by all the delegates attending. And debate was not necessarily along stereotypical fault-lines – at one stage, an academic urging the need for a more practical orientation was followed by a practitioner stressing the value of intellectual frameworks in which to situate their practice.

We are in the process of preparing the formal proceedings of the colloquium for publication; in the meanwhile, we have now posted the speaker biographies and Witness Statements to our website. Access to the document is via the following link: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/ceispdf/statements.pdf

The audio files of the chairs’ and witnesses’ speeches will shortly be added to the website, and we are also in the process of producing transcripts of the discussions, which will be included in the published proceedings.