ACerm - Accelerating Positive Change in Electronic Records Management

DLM Conference 2011, Brussels

2011-12-21T10:20:00.007Z

Attended the triennial DLM conference last week. The theme was 'Interoperability and MoReq2010 - Making intelligent information control a reality'. There were some excellent presentations/sessions and there was a lot of discussion and networking during the breaks.

Some interesting points:
- the work of DIGIT (the European Commission’s Informatics Directorate) and FEDICT (the Federal Agency for ICT, Belgium)
- the scope of interoperability. I wasn't the only speaker to highlight that it is more than the technical & semantic dimensions and that the organisational and legal dimensions, including political issues or set in the political context, are equally important and probably more difficult to resolve
- the promise and potential of MoReq2010 and ideas for further modules
- review of the EU data protection legislation - likely to be 'on the books' in 2015. Peter Hustinx, EU DP Supervisor made so many sensible and pragmatic points in his closing keynote. Amongst them were the new legislation would aim to empower data subjects (users) adding to existing rights the 'right to be forgotten' (interesting in the light of publications such as Mayer-Schonberger's book 'Delete' http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8981.html) and the 'right to data portability' - both important in the digital and social networking contexts. Clarification of the need for 'consent' was an issue those drafting the legislation needed to 'think about'.
- the discussions about the importance (or not) of tweets and their 'status' - are they records? Are they information assets?
- Eric Ketelaar's re-presentation of record keeping (or records formation as he prefers) and archiving - not two overlapping circles in the typical Venn diagram but a circle (archiving) within a larger circle (record keeping). Something for us to think about!
- very little on cloud issues (at least in the sessions I attended).

The conference ended with a call for more people/organisations to join the DLM Forum to exchange ideas, undertake work and a proposal to make the conference a biennial rather than triennial event. Very sensible in the dynamic, fast moving digital domain.

Presentations are to be uploaded to the conference website www.dlmconference.com

DATUM in Action - follow on to DATUM project

2011-12-21T10:11:00.005Z

Following on from our successful ‘DATUM for health’ project we are currently mid-way through our DATUM in Action project. Julie McLeod, Sue Childs and Elizabeth Lomas are working with a team of researchers, lead by Prof Maia Angelova, to implement good research data management for their EU funded project MATSIQEL.

Funded as part of JISC's Managing Research Data programme 2011-2013(http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata.aspx) it's one of the 8 projects that are helping research groups, projects or departments improve research data management 'on the ground'. The aim is to support the researchers fulfill disciplinary best practice and funders' requirements by implementing data management plans and supporting systems.

Full details are on the project website www.northumbria.ac.uk/datum

Launch of new research project

2010-10-01T19:49:00.001Z

Northumbria University launches the ‘DATUM for health’ research project on the 1st October. This collaborative project will develop a research data management skills programme for postgraduate research students in the health studies discipline. It is being led by the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences in partnership with colleagues from the School of Health, Community and Education Studies and The Graduate School. External partners are the Digital Curation Centre (http://www.dcc.ac.uk) and the Digital Preservation Coalition (http://www.dpconline.org). The project is funded by JISC under their Managing Research Data (JISCMRD) Programme (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/mrd.aspx) and runs till 31st July 2011. Prof Julie McLeod will be leading the project and Sue Childs will be the main researcher.

Progress on the DATUM project will be disseminated via this blog. There is also a project website http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/datum which contains a news section with an RSS feed.
A key deliverable from the DATUM project will be a research data management training programme for the health studies discipline focusing on qualitative, unstructured data. This will be made publicly available on the Web via a Creative Commons License. The aim is that this programme will be transferable to other disciplines, audiences and contexts within Northumbria University, and to the wider HE and research communities.

Though not directly on eRM, this new project has synergy with the work conducted on the AC⁺erm project. DATUM is looking at the management of qualitative, unstructured digital data. A key aim of AC⁺erm was to disseminate the project’s findings (mostly qualitative) throughout its life on a regular basis, via the Web, to emphasise the urgency of the ERM issue, influence change as the research proceeded, and encourage widespread discussion. Over 87 outputs were made available in the project’s 3 year life span. At the end of the project these outputs were updated or modified where necessary and published in a final form. The AC⁺erm website has now become an archive but this blog will remain for new research and development.

The first stage of DATUM will be a targeted literature review to identify and review (a) best practice guidelines and research data management requirements for any HEI stakeholder, with a particular focus on qualitative, unstructured data, (b) similar guidelines specifically for the health studies discipline, (c) training/learning delivery models for the range of research stakeholders, and (d) training materials. It will be interesting to see what other approaches we could use to archive the rich resource of AC⁺erm outputs to make them available for the wider community to use and repurpose.

AC+erm in Iceland at IRMA

2010-04-15T09:24:00.004Z

I was delighted to be invited to speak to members of Iceland’s Records Management Association about the AC+erm Project last week. Nearly 100 members heard our first presentation post the official end of the project and saw the public overseas premiere of the AC+erm ‘movie’ scripted by a member of the project team featuring newscasters Lancelot and Guinivere. Our Icelandic records management professionals share the UK sense of humour! The slides and movie will be posted on the AC+erm website shortly as it is currently under reconstruction now that the project has ended.

The afternoon featured two seminars. The first was linked to AC+erm, looking at the technology options for electronic records management with some examples of SharePoint implementations and interest; the second explored the future of records management in the Web 2.0 world. It was interesting to hear and debate Icelandic views on various questions about the future. Their outlook was very optimistic and positive.

The IRMA has around 220 members, which is particularly impressive in a country with a population of ~320,000 (similar to the city/suburbs of Newcastle upon Tyne!) Interestingly the majority are female and they work in a wide range of sectors as records/information managers, IT consultants and software developers.

I can highly recommend Iceland – the people I met were so welcoming and generous, the records professionals are so committed and, despite the kind of inclement weather we’re used to in the North East, a fascinating landscape. And the Fimmvorduhals volcano waited until we had left to erupt again!

Photo source: AFP International News Agency

Continued Communication Project – Collaborate in creating a mind map for RM in a Web 2.0 world

2010-03-18T09:23:00.002Z

Continued Communication is an international multidisciplinary group investigating communications in the 21st century, conceived and led by ELizabeth Lomas as part of her PhD research with Northumbria University. The group is critically evaluating how to maximise the business potential of communications created through computer mediated technologies, which incorporates any IT systems with the potential for dialogue.

In anticipation of the presentation by Katharine Stevenson and Jon Shepherd at the UK’s Records Management Society Conference next week (when Katharine and Jon will be demonstrating and discussing some of the implications for RM of new communication tools such as Google Wave, Ning, Moodle and MindMeister), the Continued Communication team would like to invite you to add your ideas and questions to a collaborative mindmap looking at the question:

“What are the challenges, solutions and questions for Records Managers in a Web 2.0 world?"

You can log in and add to the mindmap at: http://www.mindmeister.com/44873728/rm-web-2-0-challenges-and-solutions

If you are not already a user of MindMeister then you do need to register a username, an email and password to edit the map. MindMeister is then free for individuals to use and you can edit other maps and produce your own (although there are certain limits on the free service in terms of map numbers). Sign up at https://www.mindmeister.com/home/signup_editions

Editing the map is easy as the process of adding comments is fairly intuitive – click on the box you want to link to and then click on 'add', a new box will then pop up for you to type into. Boxes can be dragged, remapped and linked and you can edit existing comments. Like a wiki, all changes are tracked so feel free to edit text. MindMeister has its own help on the site but feel free to get back in touch with any queries.

The results of the mapping will be used to inform the Continued Communication Group's research and will be shown at the RMS Conference - the group hopes to continue the map throughout the Conference. The map will also be available online for a couple of months so that around the world we can reflect on the professional future (opportunities and risks for Records and Information Managers) around the globe as information creation, storage and management shifts.

Elizabeth can be contacted at elizabeth2.lomas@northumbria.ac.uk

Project outputs – Vignettes

2010-03-11T14:56:00.001Z

One of the objectives of the AC+erm Project is to develop vignettes – a type of output that crystallises aspects of the research findings in the form of tools or exemplars that can be of use to practitioners, users and other stakeholders.

The purpose of the vignettes is not only to provide ready-made tools for use (though many of them can be treated in this manner), but also to suggest models or templates for building tools whose content can be tailored to suit a given context.

We have put up the final versions of the various vignettes developed in the course of the project on our website: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/vig_diss/

The vignettes are of seven types: fridge magnets; phenomenological analyses; rich pictures; Snakes and Ladders game; narrative story; videos; mind maps; and word clouds. More detailed explanations of the tools, along with suggestions for use, are included in the documents on the website.

Prototypes of three of the vignettes – fridge magnets, rich pictures, and story – were tested and discussed by participants in the project Colloquia.

Final AC+erm Colloquium – Witness Seminar

2010-03-11T14:45:00.004Z

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.

You too can contribute to AC+erm!

2010-02-18T09:38:00.005Z

Would you like to help us in a ‘mass peer-review’ exercise to help validate some of our research findings?

As part of the AC+erm project, we have carried out a systematic literature review (SLR) of journal literature on electronic records management (ERM) published from 1996 to February 2009.

We searched for the topic ‘electronic records management’ in the following databases: LISA, EBSCO, Web of Science. (LISA covers information studies and technology, library science and publishing; EBSCO’s Business Source Premier coverage includes business, management, engineering, law, health and art; Web of Science citation indexes cover 9,000 journals across the sciences, social sciences & the arts and the humanities).

We have reviewed 1,189 from a total of 1,756 items and selected, to date, 536.
Selected outputs from the SLR data have been used to inform the initial questions for our Delphi studies and made available on our project website.

We would welcome feedback on our SLR activity to see if we have adequately identified the relevant literature. We have chosen a subset of the total number of results for validation – this subset comprises journal articles that disseminate the results of case studies and case examples (a total of 104 items).

If you are willing to share your knowledge and expertise, you can do so by downloading a Word document from our website, completing the response fields, and returning it by email to eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk. The document contains the full list of 104 articles along with brief descriptions of the cases and can be found at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/slr/

Thank you for your help.

SharePoint 2010

2010-02-05T15:38:00.004Z

A preview of SharePoint 2010 at a breakfast briefing hosted by Rocket Solutions (www.rocket-solutions.com) in wet Newcastle this morning revealed some exciting new features. Integration with line-of-business systems is significantly enhanced and the business process and workflow features look much more user firendly to create and use than in SharePoint 2007. Search capabilities include phonetic recognition; content organisation features include automatic routing of documents to document libraries and automatic provision of folder structures. All of this of course is dependent on good metadata.

The new business intelligence capabilities are particularly impressive. PowerPivot allows users to interactively analyse huge data sets (up to 1 million rows of data from an Excel spreadsheet). However this and some of the other more sophisticated features will require Office 2010.

Records management was explicitly referred to though didn't feature in the demo. The move away from the model of declaring records into a records centre towards tagging, scheduling and managing 'in situ' looks interesting. It will be good to see how this operates in practice when the product is released later in the spring.

Records Management Myths and Legends

2010-02-02T15:23:00.001Z

Continued Communication, a Northumbria University led action research group, is running two storytelling sessions for separate groups in central London (British Library Conference Centre) on Monday 1st March 2010, an afternoon session (2.30–5pm) and an Evening Session (6–8pm).

The purpose of the event is to build narrative views of the world of records management through developing short group and individual stories. We hope to capture and convey some of the values and benefits of information management and the RIM profession. Stories will be recorded and with participants' individual permission will be posted onto the Continued Communication website that is currently under development.

The event will be facilitated by Storyteller and Cognitive Edge Practitioner Ron Donaldson. Here is a link to one of Ron's storytelling events http://rondon.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/hexagons-aplenty/.

Elizabeth Lomas (Continued Communication and Northumbria University), Peter Heywood (Development coach and consultant), and James Lappin (Thinking Records), will be assisting Ron - it should be an interesting and fun event.

If you would like to come along and take part then please email elizabeth2.lomas@northumbria.ac.uk, letting her know whether you would like to attend the afternoon or the evening session.

Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines

2010-02-02T14:33:00.014Z

Last Friday (29th January), I attended this excellent conference / symposium organized by postgraduate students from HATII (the Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute) and elsewhere in Glasgow University's Arts and Humanities graduate School.

While the papers ranged far beyond what is generally considered to be the boundaries of the recordkeeping disciplines, much of the material was of at least contextual interest to the work of recordkeeping professionals, and some of it directly relevant.

The programme was split into three panels, under the thematic headings of 'Madeleines', 'Machines', and 'Monuments'. After tea and Madeleines (in homage to Proust's famous 'memory moment'), the day's business started with a keynote speech on 'Hand, Writing and Memory' from Dr Mariangela Palladino of the University of Glasgow.

The papers presented in the 'Madeleines' panel were all related in some way to the manner in which memory, as opposed to specific memories or memorials, is psychologically constructed and organized - Aislinn Hunter's paper on the resonance of 'beloved objects', though focusing on museum or heritage objects, is also readily applicable to the way in which iconic documents and records are viewed.

The 'Machines' panel explored, as one mught imagine, some of the uses or effects of technology in constructing memory and memorials. A couple focused on 'technological' memorials (a video installation of a Thai village which had suffered in past conflicts, a 'Sonic Memorial' of the Twin Towers); while readers of Derrida's 'Archive Fever' will be familiar with the terms in which Galit Wellner discussed the mobile phone as 'memory prosthesis'.

The final panel on 'Monuments' perhaps provided the closest analogues to recordkeeping. Two of the papers showed how the past could be tendentiously re-written or re-presented to back current political and ideological concerns (in one case, by physical monuments, in the other, through literature). A third dealt with a case where the published version of a work differed in certain key respects from the earlier private version, and considered possible reasons for this re-writing of the record (or at any rate, of the earlier interpretation).
Finally, Maria Francesca Martinez Tagliavia provided an exhilarating analysis of Blob, a short mash-up feature used as a filler on the Italian Rai Tre TV channel, which weaves a range of documentary and non-documentary material into a new video text of ironic, iconoclastic commentary in the belly of the Berlusconi-dominated beast.

This brief report can give only the barest sense of the complexity and richness of the papers and discussions; fortunately, an edited volume of proceedings is likely to be published at a later stage. In the meanwhile, a full list of speakers and abstracts, along with further details on the nature of the symposium in the Call for Papers, is available at event's Facebook group pages.

Investigation into the use of Microsoft SharePoint by Higher Education Institutions

2010-01-21T08:29:00.010Z

The final report from this Eduserv funded project is now freely available for download at www.northumbria.ac.uk/sharepoint_study It shows that most UK HEIs are using SharePoint to some extent (78% of the 40 HEIs interviewed in a telephone survey of mostly IT Directors). The report includes findings about types of use, drivers for using SharePoint, critical success factors for implementing SharePoint, lessons learned and thoughts on the future. It also features views from three case studies at Cranfield, Imperial College and Kingston University. The project team who conducted the work was: James Lappin (Thinking Records Ltd), Gavin Siggers (Healdan Consulting), Sue Childs and Julie McLeod (Northumbria University).

Witness Seminar: Transforming Information & Records Management through Research & Development

2009-12-04T13:02:00.005Z

12:00–18:00, 4 March 2010, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne

The fourth and final AC+erm colloquium will take the form of a Witness Seminar, to be held on ‘home turf’ in the Great Hall of Northumbria University’s newly refurbished Sutherland Building.

Building on the success of previous witness seminars this free half-day seminar focuses on the results of the AC+erm e-records management project in the broader context of research and development in information management. It provides a rare opportunity for anyone interested and/or involved in research and development or improving their organisation’s management of information and records to listen to, learn from, actively discuss and network with a range of experts and other delegates.

You are invited to join a group of UK and international information and records management, IT and information systems academics and practitioners, and engage in a critical examination of the value and nature of research and development for the information management profession.

Speakers include Steve Bailey, David Bowen, Chris Campbell, Adrian Cunningham, Paul Dodgson, Catherine Hare, John McDonald, Michael Moss, Stuart Orr and Andrew Snowden.

Delegates can contribute their own knowledge, experience, views and desires to the discussion and debate to influence the direction of future research. Posters, presentations, and other materials and tools related to the findings of the AC+erm Project and other projects conducted by Northumbria University’s Information Management Innovation (IMI) Research Group will be available to view and use.

The registration form and programme details are available at http://acerm-colloquium.eventbrite.com/

Details are also available on the AC+erm Project website at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/coll/coll4/

Information on previous Witness Seminars can be found at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/conf/wit06/ (2006) and http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/conf/wit07/ (2007).

Organised by the School of Computing, Engineering & Information Sciences at Northumbria University, funded as part of the AHRC AC+erm Project (www.northumbria.ac.uk/acerm) and sponsored by Emerald Publishing (www.emeraldinsight.com/rmj.htm).

List of electronic recordkeeping resources

2009-11-17T12:34:00.007Z

We have overhauled our annotated compilation of websites and documents relating to various aspects of electronic recordkeeping.

It is not a comprehensive list, but one that has grown organically through the life of the project as we come across material through various channels. It also incorporates items suggested or brought to our notice by AC+erm participants and well-wishers.

As before, the list includes official, professional and commercial institutions and organisations; publishers of journals and books in our disciplines, and various individual items such as articles, reports and similar documentary materials. The selection of the latter is particularly subject to the list's ad hoc process of formation – our main instrument for identifying material of this nature is the project's Systematic Literature Review, and the examples presented in the resource list are very much subsidiary to this far more substantial and rigorous undertaking.

We have also added another distinct category of resource to reflect the rapidly moving nature of the field. Much innovative thought in the records and information field is now first published to the world through blogs maintained by individual practitioners rather than by more formal routes: the revised list contains links to a number of prominent blogs and bloggers.

The earlier versions of the list were presented in straightforward alphabetical order, but as it is now rather long, we have divided the new version into a number of categories for easier use. A basic index has been provided, as well as improved presentation and navigation. We have checked out all the existing links and repaired them where necessary.

You can find the resource list on our website at: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/ceispdf/resourcelist_2009_11.pdf

The online resources from the list have been added to the AC+erm custom Google search engine, which is intended to improve the relevance of search results by focusing only on records-related websites.

Quick links to the online sources are now available through a set of Sqworl groups – links are grouped according to the same categories as used in the main list. If you haven't used Sqworl before, it is a useful tool for grouping ultiple links under one URL; it also provides a pleasant graphic interface using small snapshots of the sites linked to, rather than the standard bare blue underlined text.

Feel free to let us know if you think there are any glaring omissions from the list, or anything else that might usefully be added to it.

A Vision for ERM? Third AC+erm colloquium – Outputs

2009-11-16T14:09:00.009Z

We have just posted some outputs from the third colloquium for the AC+erm Project to our website.

We would welcome any comments you may wish to make on these outputs or on any other aspect of the colloquia or the project as a whole.

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/coll_diss/coll3_diss/

The third AC+erm colloquium focused on the ‘Systems and Technology’ facet of the project and was held on 24 September in the Merchants’ Hall in Edinburgh. Just under 30 delegates attended, adding to and extending the data from the e-Delphi data in a series of discussion forums.

The outputs from the colloquium consist of versions of the initial documents presented to the delegates, adapted to include their collated notes together with notes taken by the project team.

During the workshop, delegates also developed their ideas graphically; the outputs include images of these items.

The slides accompanying the project team’s presentations are also provided.

Forum 1
Delegates were asked to consider and comment on the full list of issues from the Systematic Literature Review and Systems and technology e-Delphi study, to add any issues they thought were missing, and to make any further comments or notes for discussion that they felt necessary.

Forum 2
Delegates examined proposed solutions to ‘Approaches to e-records management’, one of the five issues selected for further exploration in the colloquium.

Each group was allocated a single issue for discussion. Firstly, each delegate in the group completed a questionnaire (based on that used in Round 4 of the Systems and technology Delphi Study) in respect of one of the eight proposed solutions to the issue.

All delegates in the group then discussed the issue, electing one of their number as rapporteur to take notes and feed back briefly at the end of the discussion

Workshop
Delegates were divided into four groups, each of which was invited to draft a vision for e-records management.

The workshop activities were conducted using draft tools (vignettes) developed by the Project. The vignettes used were of three types—‘fridge phrases’, rich pictures, and narrative.

Each group as a whole drafted a vision for ERM. The whole group used the ‘Fridge Phrases’ tool to develop the vision and / or to articulate it more fully. They then went on to communicate the vision through rich pictures, narrative, or both.

The groups reported back their thoughts not only on the topic itself but also on the usefulness or otherwise of the vignettes as tools in this context.

2009 Emmett Leahy Award

2009-11-03T17:30:00.002Z

The Emmett Leahy Award Committee has announced that Mariella Guercio is the recipient of the 2009 award “because of the impact her work has had on the management and preservation of electronic records”. It seems fitting therefore to post the news to our blog. Given in honour of Emmett Leahy, the renowned USA pioneer of information and records management, the annual award recognizes an individual whose contributions and outstanding accomplishments have had a major impact on the records and information management profession.

Mariella Guercio, the 39th recipient of the award, is currently Chair of the Master of Records Management and Archival Science Program, Vice President Technology, and Provost at the University of Urbino, Italy. Her many achievements include work on the drafting of MoReq 1 and 2, co-director of digital preservation projects for the European Commission Electronic Research, Preservation and Access Networks (ERPANET) and the European Union Cultural, Artistics, and Scientific Knowledge for Preservation, Access, and Retrieval (CASPAR) - the latter is intended to establish a digital preservation infrastructure for Europe.

A full announcement can be seen at http://emmettleahyaward.org

SharePoint in UK Higher Education - Community Consultation

2009-11-02T11:34:00.002Z

A reminder of the deadline for the community consultation that is part of a project commissioned by Eduserv on the use of SharePoint in the HE sector (www.northumbria.ac.uk/sharepoint_study) – Monday 9 November 2009.

The aim of this online consultation is to capture the reactions of a wide range of UK HE stakeholders (i.e. managers, students, researchers, learning technologists, lecturers, administrators and vendors) to SharePoint. This will build on the data from a literature review and telephone survey of IT Directors. We would welcome responses to three questions about the IMPACT and potential FUTURE USE of SharePoint in HEIs.

Details of the consultation are at: http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/eduservsp/SP_HE_cons/

The questions and how to contribute are at:
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/worddocuments/ceis/SP_cons.doc

AC+erm in Autumn ... an update

2009-09-08T16:12:00.004Z

Now that the 'Summer' is over, we've got a few more bits of reading to help you while away those darkening Autumn evenings.

We have added the results of Round 4 of the Systems and Technology e-Delphi Study to our website. This round took the form of an online survey through which participants could vote on the solutions considered in Round 3. You can find the results through this link:
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/delphi_diss/systech_diss/

Summertime is also conference time, and we had speakers at both the Society of American Archivists (SAA) conference in Austin, Texas (Julie McLeod) and the Society of Archivists (SoA) conference in Bristol (Rachel Hardiman). You can link to the slides for these presentations through the following page on our website:
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/conf_diss/

A presentation at the earlier, Springtime, conference of the Records Management Society (RMS) gave rise to an article in the current issue of the RMS Bulletin (No. 151). You can find details of this – the first of what we hope will be a steady stream of formally published outputs from the Project – on the new 'Journals and Conference Proceedings' page of our website:
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/journ_diss

We have changed our website News page from its old static format to a 'proper' news page, with the capability of subscribing to an RSS feed for new items:
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/News2/

As always, we would be delighted to hear your thoughts on any of the project activities or outputs – leave a comment here, or e-mail us on eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk.

Archives in the 21st Century: A brief report from the Society of Archivists Conference

2009-09-08T15:57:00.003Z

Last week, I was at the (UK) Society of Archivists Conference in Bristol to deliver a paper on the AC+erm Project. It was, alas, literally a flying visit, and travel constraints prevented me from immersing myself in what looked like a varied and fascinating programme put together by the SoA conference team.

The AC+erm paper was one of three in a session entitled 'Archives in the 21st Century', the other two speakers being Steve Bailey of JISC InfoNet and Dr Karen Gracy of Kent State University. It provided an overview of the project and shone the spotlight on some of the findings from our recent e-Delphi study on the Systems and Technology aspects of managing e-records. In keeping with the session theme, it focused on three of the many issues coverd by the Delphi study: Web 2.0 technologies, Cloud Computing, and e-mail.

I'm not actually going to say much about my own paper here, as the slides are now available on our website; instead I'd like to briefly give a flavour of the session as a whole and outline some of the matters covered by Steve and Karen in their lively and informative talks.

Meet the future of records management: www.amazon.co.uk
Steve Bailey spoke on a theme he continues to explore and raise in our profession: the need for records profesisonals to adapt to a new technological world, both by tearing themselves away from principles and practices that are still, fundamentally, paper-based, and by learning from the flexible and sophisticated tools of the new technologies to create better ways and means of managing records. He has successfully publicized these and other issues in his book, Managing the Crowd (Facet: 2008).

Taking the familiar and ubiquitous example of Amazon, Steve showed how much of the functionality of Amazon's data and information management framework could not only be adapted for, but could significantly enhance, management of electronic records. This sort of approach was essential in a world where the sheer volume of electronic records / information made 'traditional' management impossible.

Predictive searching, user review and ranking, even reviews of reviews could all work to both manage and get a sophisticated picture of information and information flows. When looking for a given book on Amazon, we do not navigate via the categorization hierarchy available on the site, but through direct input of title or auithor to the search field, where a number of extended search terms are also automatically generated to help narrow the field. This is a far more intuitive way of looking for something, whether a book or a business record, than via a classification scheme or file-plan.

Classification itself could be refined and made more useful by allowing user tags. Functions such as 'people who bought his item also bought' could be used to help users identify not only the spcific records they needed, but also any related items or series, and which other staff or units had also used or conuslted these records. This sort of high-level information could be used for management purposes as well, as could the whole 'mashable' ethos of Web 2.0 fucntionality and use. Steve spoke also about the ability all this offered of harnessing the 'wisdom of the crowd'.

Though Steve's focus was more on the user experience and on the flexibility of the Amazon website's functionality, he did note that there was some structure behind it that Amazon as a company rather than the user might find of use, such as the categorization scheme. What struck me as the presentation went on was that the two things were not at all counterposed, and that the 'traditional' elements of classification and assignation of standardized metadata were just as important as the search and use aspects. What we need to bear in mind is that they were not necessarily both important to the same constituencies, nor equally important in different contexts, and I think it is this that (some) records professionals may have been slow to react to.

Processes and structures that are vital to Amazon in managing their stock and their business flows are of no interest to the user; this does not mean that they are not critical to Amazon's information management. The structure, the rigour, the hierarchy must still be there – it just does not need to be the principal entry point to the system for the user (though it should always be available as an alternative). But I would certainly agree with Steve that, if they are to be truly useful, usable and (above all) used, electronic records management systems need to look and feel very different from what we see now – and that the Amazon model is a very good reference point against which to set our sights.

De Facto Archiving: The Use of Social Networking Sites for Collection Building and Preservation
Karen Gracy's talk dealt with processes and needs seemingly far removed from the management of electronic business records, but that were equally affected and challenged by the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies. Specializing in the various technical and cultural aspects of the preservation and curation of moving images, she examined the particular problems encountered by institutions with holdings of such material in a 'YouTube age'.

The issues were complex, with many oppositiosn and tensions that are not capable of straightforward resolution. Whereas with still digital images, a certain amount of standardization and best practice has emerged (e.g. JPEG 2000), this is still in its infancy in the context of moving images. It is so prohibitively expensive to produce digital versions of a quality comparable to the analogue originals that 'archival-quality' digitization projects of any extent are effectively not an option.

Nor are the difficulties faced in letting holdings out 'into the wild' purely technical. Tensions between (public and unmediated) access and (institutional) control do not rest on simple antitheses based, say, on ownership: Karen spoke of worries about the re-use of decontextualized moving images in the public domain and the loss of institutional authority if practices such as user tagging are given or seen to have a weight comparable to that of the professional expertise and knowledge offered by archives, museums, etc.

There can be a certain naivety in assuming that Web 2.0 technologies provided by commercial providers are a suitable vehicle for broadening access to or even providing an alternative repository for institutional collections. While institutions may have been correct in accepting that commercial offerings are more advanced and flexible than anything they could develop themselves, they still have to grapple with issues of ownership and of what happens to both content and the rights to it if a service closes down. This is most worrying where a decision has been made (and Karen gave examples) to use a comemrcial web-based service (YouTube) not just to store copies for access but to actually constitute the only repository for a moving image collection. Converting high-quality film to low-quality digital versions, posting the the latter to YouTube, and then ceasing to care for the former is highly questionable from the perspective of long-term preservation.

Karen's presentation also covered other aspects and emphases and included examples and statistics relating to the use of Web 2.0 in the context of moving images. It was both informative and thought-provoking, and showed that while comparisons might be made with the way in which archives make use of Web 2.0 technologies in the context of still images, there are some significant impediments (as well as opportunities) to adopting the same approach with moving images.

Conclusion
Both Steve's and Karen's talks looked in detail at issues that have been touched upon in AC+erm, but which have not emerged as topics for more intensive investigation – not because they are peripheral or without merit, but because they lie outside (current) core practice and processes within electronic records management (ERM). Because of this, the three talks complemented each other well, and their juxtaposition meant that they could be viewed as connected rather than artificially separated aspects of the challenges thrown up by digital technologies. The differnt approaches of research-based findings and 'thinking outside the box' also worked well together.

To be hopelessly reductive: Steve dealt with the 'now' of internet business practice, looking at IT capabilities and ways of organizing information that should be (but generally are not) adopted and adapted for use by recordkeeping professionals. It is a world of virtual social interaction, mash-ups, aggregation of information, the 'wisdom of the crowd'.

Karen's perspective and concerns were more archival, looking at the issues surrounding both preserving and making available the holdings of archival moving image collections in digital form. The Web 2.0 approaches advocated by Steve are at once highly seductive and fraught with complexity in this arena, in a much more problematic interplay of contesting perspectives.

My presentation dealt with the views of experts in records and information management working within organisational contexts generally coloured by more 'mainstream' approaches to ERM, where the issue of long-time preservation is recognized but seldom within the remit of ERM projects, and where e-mail rather than the newer technologies still constitutes the truly intractable business recordkeeping problem.

In each of the three presentations, the speaker dwelt on both the difficulties and opportunities offered to our disciplines and professions by the contemporary technological environment. From listening to what Steve and Karen had to say, and to the speakers from the floor in the discussion session afterwards, it seems clear to me that any progress to be made must involve a degree of re-imagination in our management and even conceptualization of the 'stuff' for which we are responsible, so that these (and other) currently disparate strands become woven into the same fabric. The energy and focus of this conference certainly suggests that there is no lack of will to rise to the challenge.

New SharePoint study

2009-08-05T14:48:00.006Z

Members of the AC+erm project team and two other colleagues outside the University have just started work on a new project to investigate the uptake and use of Microsoft SharePoint by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the UK.

The study is being funded by Eduserv under their Research Programme because there is evidence that interest in Microsoft SharePoint solutions is growing within the UK education and wider public sector. (Interest in SharePoint has also emerged from the AC+erm project). The two main reasons for the project are:

- to improve HEIs’ understanding about the level and nature of interest in SharePoint and whether it is justified in terms of accepted good practice
- to enhance Eduserv’s understanding about the uptake and usage of SharePoint solutions in the UK HE community and influence their 2-3 year plans for service provision in line with their charitable mission.

The study, which began on 27 July and ends on 13 November 2009, will include a mix of telephone interviews, face-to-face meetings and an online public consultation. The final report will be made freely available to the community under a Creative Commons licence. Please see the project website for further details. http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sharepoint_study

Eduserv is a not-for-profit IT service provider with a charitable mission to realise the benefits of ICT for learners and researchers. Eduserv is dedicated to developing effective technology solutions that meet the needs of universities, colleges and public sector organisations. http://www.eduserv.org.uk/research

Julie McLeod

The RAIN-man Cometh

2009-07-01T09:37:00.002Z

Wednesday 8 July 4:00–5.30pm
Room NB450 (4th Floor) Northumberland Building, Northumbria University

‘Compliance Products for Information, Content and Records Management’
Peter Kurilecz, Senior Systems Architect, IBM's ECM Lab Services Compliance Group, USA.

After the success of the last talk given by a distinguished overseas visitor (Joanne Evans – see previous post), we are delighted to welcome Peter Kurilecz to Northumbria University. He has over 30 years experience in the records management and archives profession, and is a member of the Institute of Certified Records Managers, the Academy of Certified Archivists, ARMA International and AIIM. He is also a member of ARMA International's Standards Development Committee. He will be well known to many in the UK through his regular RAIN posts to the listservs (‘Records and Archives In the News’).

Content Collector (email and fileshares), Content Manager and Records Manager make up IBM FileNet's compliance suite of products. Peter, a Senior Systems Architect with IBM, is responsible for assisting customers in the design and implementation of compliance solutions based upon this suite of products. He will demonstrate how emails are captured and declared as records, the automated capture of files system, the destruction of records and placing records on hold, using a VMware image. The demonstration will be followed by a question and answer session about the products as well as the challenges of implementing them.

As with the previous event, this talk and demonstration is open to all interested parties, not just our colleagues and students in Northumbria.

The Northumberland Building is No. 9 on the map http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/brochure/visit/campus_branch/ncle_cmp/city_campus/.

AC+erm ‘Expert Adviser’ appointed to Australia’s Government 2.0 Taskforce

2009-06-30T10:35:00.004Z

We were alerted recently, through a posting to the Aus-Archivists listserv, that Adrian Cunningham of the National Archives of Australia has been included in a new Government 2.0 Taskforce. Adrian is, along with John McDonald of Canada, one of the two international members of the AC+erm Project Expert Panel. We are naturally delighted to be able to congratulate Adrian on this appointment, which undoubtedly reflects the role that he and the NAA have played in raising the profile of recordkeeping within official circles. Adrian has given us an idea of the background and remit of the Taskforce, from which we quote below.

“I am very excited by the opportunity and very glad that, out of 15 experts from private, public, NGO and higher education sectors, they have chosen to include a records professional. The impetus for it comes from our (relatively) new Government’s commitment to open government, citizen engagement/participatory democracy, and to encouraging the use/reuse of public sector information for a more informed/socially included citizenry and as an enabler of economic growth, etc – all things that are very close to my heart.

The model for it is the UK Power of Information Taskforce report, which I am sure you are familiar with. A related development is the recent announcement by our Government of its intention to create an Office of the Information Commissioner – both to drive strengthened FOI laws and also to ensure whole of government coherence and coordination of information management and access policies and practices. One of the things I have often bemoaned is the absence of any real whole-of-government approach to IM in the Australian Government – unlike Canada for instance and all of John’s great work there.

The NAA has done its best on the records front (without any clear legislative mandate to get engaged in front-end recordkeeping), but we have been hampered by the fact that records have to be managed as part of a holistic approach to IM – and there has been an IM policy vacuum in the Australian Government for as long as I can remember. How the NAA will relate to the new Office of the Information Commissioner is yet to be clarified – but clearly it will be a very important relationship for us. The Taskforce will
hopefully lay some of the foundations for that – the OIC is not due to commence until January at the earliest.

Although IM, much less recordkeeping, is not an explicit part of the terms of reference for the Taskforce – it is implicit, as none of the Taskforce’s objectives can be achieved without first having good IM in place – so I think that will be my unique contribution to the Taskforce, even though I will of course be very interested in all its other issues.

Consistent with the aims of the Taskforce, our aim is that most of our deliberations will be conducted in the open via Web2.0 technology – so watch those spaces.”

We will certainly be watching those spaces with interest here, as no doubt will many others in the recordkeeping professions around the world.

http://gov2.net.au/

Third AC+erm Colloquium – Tackling the Technology Issues Together

2009-06-25T11:33:00.005Z

Project Colloquium

24 September 2009

The Merchants’ Hall, Edinburgh

22 Hanover Street, Edinburgh EH2 2EP

"RM is something that should be done not something that can be bought and installed."
(Participant in AC+erm e-Delphi Study)

This free event shares the latest results of our major evidence-based research project taking a strategic approach to accelerating positive change in electronic records management. Discover what you can adopt from the experience of different stakeholders in different disciplines, sectors and countries. Compare your approach and contribute your knowledge and experience to the findings. Try out some of the 'tools' being developed in the project and share your views.

The colloquium provides a chance for you to learn, influence, share, benchmark and contribute to the challenge of positive change in managing our e-information assets by taking part in discussion forums and a workshop. Take away fresh insights and benefit from trans-disciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives and expertise.

The discussions of solutions to technological issues will focus on five selected topics:

Approaches to e-Records Management (ERM) (e.g. stand-alone EDRMS, embedding RM in line of business systems etc.)
Trade-offs in ERM implementation
Technical aspects of ERM (e.g. compatibility, customisation, usability)
Automation of records management processes
Cloud computing and ERM

For full details, agenda and Registration Form, click on the link below.

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/coll/coll3/

Process Facet e-Delphi Study outputs: Round 1 – Summary of participant responses

2009-06-23T13:46:00.001Z

The interim analysis of responses received to the first round of questions under the e-Delphi study on the Process facet of the project is now available on our website.

In Round 1 of the e-Delphi Study, participants were asked to give their thoughts on 20 process-related issues identified through the Systematic Literature Review, and to add any that they felt were missing from the list.

The responses to the questionnaire have now been summarised and are available at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/ceispdf/pr1r1_summ.pdf.

Other outputs from the Process facet can be viewed at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/delphi_diss/process_diss/

International visitors @ Northumbria University

2009-06-23T06:45:00.003Z

A few weeks ago we were delighted to host a visit from Dr Joanne Evans, Research Fellow, eScholarship Research Centre, Melbourne University, Australia who gave a lunchtime seminar on 'Discovery and innovation: action research within communities of practice.' Joanne outlined the use of action research in Monash University's Clever Recordkeeping Metadata Project (http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/groups/rcrg/crkm/). She was a member of the project team which, like AC+erm, brought together researchers and practitioners to investigate a recordkeeping problem. The focus was the requirements for recordkeeping metadata interoperability explored through the attempted iterative development of a demonstrator of how standards-compliant metadata could be created once in particular application environments, then used many times to meet a range of business and recordkeeping purposes. A key outcome from the project was the need to foster such research partnerships for further discovery and innovation. In a couple of weeks we're looking forward to hosting a visit from another international visitor Peter Kurilecz. Peter is a Senior Systems Architect for IBM in the compliance arena working with their email manager and records management products. He is also well known in the UK for his RAIN updates on the RM listserv. He will be visiting us on Wed 8 July and we're hoping to host an open meeting. Please put the date in your diary and watch this space for more details.....

Project Outputs – Interim findings from the Systems and Technology Facet e-Delphi Study (2)

2009-06-17T09:57:00.002Z

Following on from our previous posts, we have now added a further output from the Systems and Technology e-Delphi Study to the project website:

Round 1 – summary of participant responses [link]

You can gain access to these findings through the link above, or on the project website at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/delphi_diss/systech_diss/

Project Outputs – Interim findings from the Systems and Technology Facet e-Delphi Study

2009-06-12T14:50:00.003Z

To date, the first two e-Delphi study—for the People and Process facets of the investigation—have been carried out.

The current Delphi, in respect of the Systems and Technology facet, is now almost completed. Though not all of the data contained in the participant responses has yet been analysed, we are able to make some of the results available in interim form.

Participants in the Delphi study identified, explored and clarified the issues in three rounds of questions and a final exercise (in progress) in which solutions arrived at in previous rounds are evaluated by a number of set criteria.

We aim to analyse the participants' responses using a range of different approaches (subject themes, numerical ratings, subjective explorations) to provide a 360-degree view of the data.

We also intend to produce outputs in textual, numerical, graphical and diagrammatic forms to support different cognitive styles.

The outputs now available from the Delphi Study are:

All rounds – list of questions for participants [link]

Round 2 – ranking of issues in terms of urgency/importance (graphs and tables) [link]

Round 3 – summary of solutions [link]

You can gain access to these findings through the links above, or on the project website at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/delphi_diss/systech_diss/

Systematic Literature Review – Sources relating to systems and technology

2009-06-12T14:46:00.004Z

The Delphi Study investigating the Systems and Technology facet of the project, now in its final stages of completion, was—like the previous two studies—informed by the results of the Systematic Literature Review (SLR).

The details and content summaries of sources from the SLR prepared for the systems and technology Delphi are now available on our website at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/diss_slr/

The document is entitled ‘Interim Analysis Technology Issues 2009.04’ [Link]

The analysis contains synopses of more than 200 sources, grouped under a variety of categories and sub-headings.

Second AC+erm colloquium – Outputs

2009-05-15T15:32:00.009Z

We are pleased to finally be in a position to post some outputs from the second colloquium for the AC+erm Project to our website. We would welcome any comments you may wish to make on these outputs or on any other aspect of the colloquia or the project as a whole.

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/coll_diss/coll2_diss/

This event focused on the ‘Process’ facet of the project and was held on 26 March in the REP conference centre in at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Over 30 delegates attended, adding to and extending the data from the e-Delphi data in a series of discussion forums.

Forum 1—Delegates were asked to consider and comment on the full list of issues from the SLR and Process e-Delphi study, and to add any issues they felt were missing.

Forum 2—Delegates were divided into six groups; each group was allocated a single issue for discussion and asked to comment on the solutions that had been proposed through the e-Delphi study.

Workshop—The delegate groups were asked to evaluate and comment on three draft vignettes/tools based on the solutions offered in the e-Delphi study.

The first was ‘Fridge Frases’ or ‘Fridge Phrases’, where words and phrases are available in the style of ‘fridge magnets’ to form issues and ideas for training sessions, brainstorming, etc.

The second took the form of ‘rich pictures’ – issues or problems are encapsulated and explored through pictorial representations, in a flexible and non-linear manner.

The final type of tool was a story – issues or problems are presented through a ‘personalised’ narrative, from a particular perspective (in this case, of a systems user).

In each session, the delegates were asked to make notes and/or appoint a rapporteur to report back from the discussion; the initial issues/solutions list plus the collated notes of the rapporteurs and individual delegates form the outputs from the colloquium.

AC+erm at the RMS Conference

2009-05-13T15:02:00.005Z

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.

An illustrious forebear

2009-05-12T15:09:00.004Z

Last week, I paid a lunchtime visit to one of the many jewels in Newcastle’s cultural crown, the Laing Art Gallery, which is currently hosting the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008, on tour from the National Portrait Gallery.

As an adjunct to the photographic exhibition, the gallery had devoted a room to a parallel display of painted portraits from its own collection. Among these was the striking image of the old lady pictured here, holding the eye with her piercing and watchful gaze.

Imagine my delight when, on closer inspection, she turned out to be none other than Judy Dowling, ‘Keeper of the Town Hutch’, painted by Henry Perlee Parker in or around 1820. Who?, I hear you ask; keeper of the what? I’ll quote from the gallery’s explanatory notice:

“This portrait shows Judy Dowling, a well-known figure in 19th-century Newcastle. She was the Keeper of the Town ‘Hutch’, a chest where the records and archives for Newcastle had been stored since medieval times. … Judy can also be seen in Parker’s picture ‘Eccentric and Well Known Characters in Newcastle (private collection), which was widely known through prints.”

So not only was this grande dame a distant professional ancestor, and gatekeeper to our city’s trusted pre-digital repository; she also had a public profile that her modern equivalents would happily sell their souls for ...

The picture shown here is made available through the Tyne and Wear Museums website, and can be found in that context through the link below, along with other works from the collections.

http://tinyurl.com/obsatq

Back to the Future - RMS Conference 19-21 April 2009

2009-05-11T11:40:00.021Z

It's good to read that Northumbria's research gets a mention in Martin Sanderson's review of the recent Records Management Society Conference - Back to the Future(http://blog.tfpl.com/tfpl/2009/05/records-management-society-conference-april-2009-back-to-the-future.html)

Rachel Hardiman gave a presentation on the AC+erm project, outlining what the project is about, how we are doing it and the type of outputs to date, including vignettes (or tools) we are drafting. She demonstrated the idea of scripting a training video with the first two AC+erm 'movie stars' - Lancelot and Guinevere - using xtranormal's free Text-to-Movie (TM) movie-making software (http://www.xtranormal.com/) She asked delegates for input to a short film aimed at records and information managers to get across ways in which to apply ERM methodologies that suit the users rather than themselves.

Some of Elizabeth Lomas' co-researchers gave a presentation around her PhD study called 'Continued Communication', which Martin highlights as "new and innovative action/participative research". Elizabeth also gave her own presentation on aligning records management, risk and information security standards and models, based on her extensive professional experience.

Reading reports like this helps us understand the impact the project is having and the feedback is important for the work we do to the end of the project. We'll try to respond to it. Thank you.

Web 2.0 / Cloud Computing events

2009-04-03T15:18:00.001Z

Ahead of our final e-Delphi study on technology issues I thought I would highlight two events I’ve recently attended.

Get inside the cloud of information – private data in public places organised by TfPL, London attracted around 50 people from the public and private sectors and focused on what the cloud means not what it is. John Sheridan, Head of e-Services at The National Archives delivered the keynote covering their Power of Information taskforce work and the semantic web, highlighting the concept of ‘linked data’. The economics of using the cloud were examined and a range of people provided case studies of the early adoption of the technology, driven by the need to recover from a disaster to coping with a failing email service, to the need for more efficient and effective collaboration. The strength of cloud computing for collaboration featured strongly; the information management approach, interestingly, seemed to be based on the ‘keep everything’ premise. Speakers had few concerns about entrusting organisational data to cloud service providers such as Google assured by the contracts they had signed and statements about the location of their data (in Europe). An excellent interactive session provided the opportunity to exchange views on the potential uses of cloud services and delegates’ preferences and the breaks allowed further networking opportunities. Another excellent, timely event from TfPL who shared that they had adopted the cloud (Google Docs) to organise it. Full programme at http://www.tfpl.com/thought_leadership/cloudcomputing.cfm Listen to a brief review of the event in the next episode of our new Records Management Today podcast series (www.northumbria.ac.uk/records_management_today).

Archives 2.0: Shifting dialogues between archivist and users hosted by CRESC, Manchester attracted a small audience of archivists and academics. Speakers included researchers from CRESC, information professionals from a range of organisations from small archives collections to larger national collections and academics. Together they covered a very wide range of topics. For example, the use of GIS to understand movement of people in Manchester; the use of a blog and twitter in Deseronto Archives, Canada and its positive impact on extending the collection; the organisational approach to the use of Web 2.0 technologies taken by the National Library of Wales and the British Library’s approach to developing a strategy for improving access to its collections for social scientists and engaging them in the process; Web 2.0’s democratisation of archival practice (resonance here with records management practice) and a real-time recording of Brian Kelly’s presentation on a risk and opportunities framework for Archives 2.0, now on his blog http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cultural-heritage/events/archives2.0-2009/ Fuller details of the event are available at http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/archiveseries/Conference.html

Julie McLeod

Records Management Today Podcast Series

2009-04-01T15:09:00.008Z

We’re pleased to announce a new monthly podcast on the records management issues affecting organisations and professionals today, from Northumbria University’s School of Computing, Engineering & Information Sciences http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/records_management_today

Regular contributors:

• Julie McLeod, Professor in Records Management at Northumbria University & Project Director AC+erm research project www.northumbria.ac.uk/acerm

• Elizabeth Lomas, PhD Researcher at Northumbria University (Continued Communication - records management and Web 2.0 communications). Formerly a records management practitioner for 15 years, interested in information rights law and chair of the Society of Archivists’ Legislation and standards working party http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/phd/e_lomas/

• James Lappin, Records management consultant and trainer. Director of Thinking Records Ltd. Chair of RMS London group. James' records management blog can be found at http://www.thinkingrecords.co.uk

Each month the three of us will discuss recent events and activities and their implications or learning for managing records in organizations; we’ll look at things that are coming up (eg significant meetings, reports etc.) and have short items focusing on specific topics. Leading international names will also participate as guest speakers.

Visit the website and subscribe to the series

Project outputs; news

2009-04-01T11:04:00.003Z

We have added a couple of items to the Dissemination area of our website.

Conferences and Presentations
Slides from a presentation made by Sue Childs at EDRM in Practice ’09, held in Birmingham earlier this year http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/ceispdf/EDRM_Pr_2009.pdf.

The updated list of conference and other papers / presentations can be found at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/conf_diss/

Delphi Studies
A thematic analysis of responses relating to ERMS, drawn from both the People and Process facets and produced for the EDRM in Practice session mentioned above http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/static/5007/ceispdf/prdpd_ta_erms.pdf

The News section of the website has also been updated; you can have a look at what we’re up to at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/acerm_news/.
As you will see, Sue Childs has just presented a paper at the UKAIS conference in Oxford (the slides will shortly be made available) and Rachel Hardiman is scheduled to speak at the RMS conference in Brighton next month.

Second AC+erm colloquium

2009-03-31T09:51:00.001Z

The second colloquium for the AC+erm Project—focusing on the ‘Process’ facet of the project—was held on 26 March, in the REP conference centre in at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Over 30 delegates attended, adding to and extending the data from the e-Delphi data in a series of discussion forums (http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/coll/coll2/)
Forum 1—Delegates were asked to consider and comment on the full list of issues from the Systematic Literature Review and Process e-Delphi study, and to add any issues they felt were missing.

Forum 2—Delegates were divided into six groups; each group was allocated a single issue for discussion and asked to comment on the solutions that had been proposed through the e-Delphi study.

Workshop—Delegates were asked to evaluate and comment on three draft vignettes/tools based on the solutions offered in the e-Delphi study.

In each forum, the delegates were asked to make notes and/or appoint a rapporteur to report back from the discussion; the initial issues/solutions list plus the collated notes of the rapporteurs and individual delegates form the outputs from the colloquium.

The comments and evaluations supplied by the delegates are currently being collated and written up, and will be made available through the Project website as soon as possible.Feel free to comment on the colloquium or on any aspect of the AC+erm project—the more feedback we get, the more we are able to ensure that the project reflects the living as well as the ideal aspects of e-records and e-recordkeeping.

Building Bridges

2009-03-06T12:47:00.006Z

We attended this JISC infoNet event in Gateshead this week (http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/events/buildingbridges), which was aimed at records and information professionals working in further and higher education but with some attendees from the wider public sector.

Day 1 was an interesting mix of sessions including views of different staff (customers) on records and information management, demonstrations of potential software solutions, advice and case studies from records managers about how they were tackling records management implementation in their organisations.

In the context of our AC+erm project and other recent activities it was good that the event kicked off with views from three of the four key stakeholder groups – senior manager, IT manager and systems administrator. Including these stakeholders in all parts of our project has been a fundamental principle. All three speakers were very positive whether they spoke in terms of data, information or records – and the senior manager stated that email was dysfunctional for him. The session on MS SharePoint included a useful demo of the out-of-the-box version for anyone who hadn’t seen it and the presentation by John Newton on Alfresco generated a lot of interest. It looks poised to take some market share in the IRM space!

The question and answer sessions covered a very wide range of topics including the most effective location of the RM function in the organisational structure, realistic expectations of records managers (often in one-person bands), risk and RM, knowledge and skills, and preservation of research records.

The main focus of Day 2 was on a new project JISC infoNet are about to start on measuring the benefits of managing records. Steve Bailey introduced a proposed framework for identifying and generating measurable value, based on the ‘lean manufacturing’ model developed by Taiichi Ohno in Toyota. We then split into four groups to discuss the possibilities and problems of this approach in an IM/RM context. The issues raised by the groups turned out to be strikingly similar – some of the main areas of debate centred on how to quantify the often qualitative benefits of good IM/RM; how to identify and separate out a purely RM element on which a value could be put; the importance of cultural factors; and the question of corporate buy-in and resourcing.

There was a definite buzz during the two days; it was good to catch up with former students and other colleagues and to make new connections. Perhaps because the location was on the banks of the Tyne, or because the event took place in the Bridge Conference Space at Gateshead College, the building bridges analogy was well used.

[Tag: #buildingbridges09]

Some more speaking engagements for AC+erm

2009-02-19T16:27:00.005Z

The Project Team has been invited to take part in a couple of forthcoming events.

On 23 February, Prof Julie McLeod will address the British Computer Society (Newcastle upon Tyne and District Branch) on Records Management, including a discussion of the AC+erm Project.

The next day, on 24 February, Sue Childs will be chairing EDRM in Practice ’09, a one-day seminar for public-sector organisations implementing, or thinking about implementing, EDRM systems, in Birmingham.

Further details of these and other future and recent activities can be found on our Website news page at
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/acerm_news/

Process Facet e-Delphi Study outputs: Multiple rounds – What is new?

2009-02-19T15:41:00.004Z

Phenomenological Analysis: What if anything is really new in the e-environment?

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no thing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9 (King James Version))

Agreement or disagreement with the quote lies in the view taken about what aspect of the phenomenon needs to be original or novel to make it truly new. The concept or the fundamental function, activity or requirement may not be novel but its application, implementation, interpretation or satisfaction may well be. If we consider that it is only that second aspect (application etc) that needs to be different for something to be new, then it is easy to refute the quote.

So, is email new? Is the Web new? Are so-called Web 2.0 technologies ‘new’? Is SaaS (software as a service) and cloud computing? Yes and no. What is really new in the e-environment and what is the same? What is the element of novelty, newness?

Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title link.

Phenomenological Analysis is applied to participant responses; this method provides subjective insights into a topic (phenomenon) through the researcher’s exploring it in depth using their experience and imagination. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/qualmethone.html

Process Facet e-Delphi Study outputs: Multiple rounds – RM Principles

2009-02-19T15:26:00.008Z

RM Principles & Methods in the e-Environment – Phenomenological Analysis of participant responses to the Process e-Delhi Study

The big question is ‘what are the RM principles and methods?’ Are the principles about creation, capture, appraisal, storage, organization, maintenance/preservation, retrieval & access, retention; are they the characteristics of records (authenticity, reliability, integrity, usability); are they the lifecycle and continuum theories/models? Which are the methods? What makes them distinctive from other information management domains – appraisal & retention management? Anything else?

Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title of this post.

Updates to the blog

2009-02-19T15:16:00.001Z

If you are following this blog closely, you will notice a flurry of posts over the next short while, as we try to streamline the way in which we provide project outputs and information.

Some of the posts relate to material already mentioned on the blog, others to findings and information that are either new or have been posted only to the website.

Either way, we hope that you find the outputs of interest, and welcome any comments you may have on what we are doing with the AC+erm Project.

Process Facet e-Delphi Study outputs: Round 5 – Evaluation of solutions (human aspects)

2009-02-19T12:43:00.003Z

Participants in the Delphi study on the Process aspects of ERM identified, explored and clarified the issues in four rounds of questions and a final exercise in which solutions arrived at in previous rounds were evaluated by a number of set criteria.

In Round 5 of the e-Delphi Study, participants were asked to rate the solutions provided in previous rounds according to a variety of criteria, by selecting from drop-down boxes.

Because the solutions fell naturally into two categories—the first based on the process issues themselves, the second on the human aspects of these issues—the round was split into two separate questionnaires. The summary results are shown in a series of tables and charts.

For the full analysis of the evaluation of human-related solutions, please click on the title of this post.

Process Facet e-Delphi Study outputs: Round 5 – Evaluation of solutions (process aspects)

2009-02-19T12:37:00.005Z

In Round 5 of the e-Delphi Study, participants were asked to rate the solutions provided in previous rounds according to a variety of criteria, by selecting from drop-down boxes.

For the full analysis of the evaluation of process-related solutions, please click on the title of this post.

Process Facet e-Delphi Study outputs: Round 3 – Summary of solutions

2009-02-19T12:20:00.004Z

In Round 3 of the e-Delphi Study, participants were asked to suggest solutions to issues that had emerged in previous rounds. The summary results are shown in a series of tables.

For the full analysis, please click on the title of this post.

Process Facet e-Delphi Study outputs: Round 2 – Ranking of issues

2009-02-19T11:45:00.005Z

In Round 2 of the e-Delphi Study, participants were asked to rank the issues explored in Round 1 in order of urgency. The results are shown in a series of tables and graphs.

For the full analysis, please click on the title of this post.

Process Facet e-Delphi Study outputs – All rounds

2009-02-19T11:29:00.005Z

For the full list of questions put to the participants in Rounds 1–4, please click on the title of this post.

Project Outputs – Some interim findings from the Process Facet e-Delphi Study

2009-02-19T11:08:00.004Z

Second AC+erm Colloquium – Tackling the Process Issues Together

2009-02-19T10:33:00.004Z

26 March 2009

Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham
REP Conference and Banqueting Centre (Victoria Suite)
Centenary Square, Broad Street, Birmingham, B1 2EP

The majority of eDRMS implementations I have seen to date are marvellous examples of tail wagging the dog – the creation of systems of control that service a few RM people in the organisation and ignore the business usability for everyone else – this is simply not sustainable. (Participant in AC+erm e-Delphi Study)

This free event shares the latest results of a major evidence-based research project taking a strategic approach to accelerating positive change in electronic records management. Discover what you can adopt from the experience of different stakeholders in different disciplines, sectors and countries. Compare your approach and contribute your knowledge and experience to the findings. Try out some of the tools being developed in the project and share your views.

The colloquium provides a chance for you to learn, influence, share, benchmark and contribute to the challenge of positive change in managing our e-information assets by taking part in discussion forums and a workshop. Take away fresh insights and benefit from trans-disciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives and expertise.

For full details, agenda and Registration Form, click on the title of this post.

Turf Wars between Professions – Phenomenological Analysis of participant responses to the People e-Delhi Study

2009-02-19T10:21:00.003Z

Elements here include (roughly categorised):

exactly which professions are involved in turf wars? Can we accurately represent this so that we don’t imply wars that don’t exist? Records managers & archivists; records managers and IT; information managers & knowledge managers; IT and information systems; archivists and IT; etc.
history of the professions (where they came from); nature of people in each profession; perceptions of their purpose/role; beliefs; knowledge and skills; qualifications
perceptions of the status/value of one’s profession; power struggles (especially concern of archivists & records managers being valued less/having less power than IT people); sense of vulnerability, lack of confidence vs. great confidence
professionals’ own views/perceptions vs. impact of views/perceptions of others

Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title of this post.

Change within the management class – Phenomenological Analysis of participant responses to the People e-Delhi Study

2009-02-19T10:15:00.004Z

One respondent’s view:

"RM can’t require a whole management class to change"

The key facets of this phenomenon are:

Do managers need to change their views/perceptions etc of RM? If so, what change is required, when and why?
Who is responsible for making the change happen? Does it matter?Why and how can organisations survive without good RM? Is that different to survival without other aspects of good management? What are the drivers?

Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title of this post.

Essential skills for ERM – Phenomenological Analysis of participant responses to the People e-Delhi Study

2009-02-19T10:10:00.004Z

One respondent’s view:

"The essential skills for ERM are (in order from most to least important):
project management, change management, business process analysis, technology,
records management."

There seem to be two critical aspects to this issue (phenomenon) – (i) what are the essential skills for ERM and (ii) who needs them. Additional aspects are when are these essential skills needed, are some more important at particular times, and how are they best acquired. Formal education and training? CPD? Work-based training? Through experience?
Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title of this post.

Phenomenological Analysis is applied to participant responses; this method provides subjective insights into a topic (phenomenon) through the researcher’s exploring it in depth using their experience and imagination. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/qualmethone.html

Cultural Change – Phenomenological Analysis of participant responses to the People e-Delhi Study

2009-02-19T10:03:00.006Z

“RM is not an element in the culture of an organisation but an essential tool. It must be applicable across all types of organisational cultures. You cannot change cultural conditions to an optimum to suit RM.”

There was divergence in views on cultural change among the participants of the Delphi study on the people aspects of designing an architecture for ERM. Some participants felt that records/information management needed to be part of an organisation’s culture, others disagreed. This divergence stimulated a topic for further discussion:

Question: RM is not an element in the culture of an organisation but an essential tool. It must be applicable across all types of organisational cultures. You cannot change cultural conditions to an optimum to suite RM. Others disagree – citing the problem of failing to bring about prior cultural change.

Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title of this post.

Phenomenological Analysis is applied to participant responses; this method provides subjective insights into a topic (phenomenon) through the researcher’s exploring it in depth using their experience and imagination. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/qualmethone.html

Change Management – Phenomenological Analysis of participant responses to the People e-Delhi Study

2009-02-18T17:06:00.004Z

There are a number of models and techniques for change management. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_management_%28people%29) notes that “The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change.” Some of the concepts described in the Wikipedia entry for individual change management comprise: ...

Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title of this post.

Phenomenological Analysis is applied to participant responses; this method provides subjective insights into a topic (phenomenon) through the researcher’s exploring it in depth using their experience and imagination. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/qualmethone.html

Bottom Line – Phenomenological Analysis of participant responses to the People e-Delhi Study

2009-02-18T17:03:00.006Z

Will ERM systems improve the ‘records’ bottom line in organisations? Will they improve records quality, access to and use of records, and exploitation of the ‘value’ contained in records? (focus on the people aspects)Records quality isn’t the content per se, it’s more what is stored (kept) and for how long - so the unimportant and ephemeral are kept just for as long as they are required then deleted. This leaves the RM effort to be concentrated on the important and the long term value records. Access is about ease with which this can be done by users, how quickly it can be done, and that the required record is found when required (precision/recall/specificity etc.). Without this, use just can’t happen. If you’re keeping the records you should be keeping, and can easily find them when you need them, then the huge ‘knowledge’ resource bound up in these records can be further exploited beyond their initial purpose and used to the benefit of the organisation.
Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title link.

Phenomenological Analysis is applied to participant responses; this method provides subjective insights into a topic (phenomenon) through the researcher’s exploring it in depth using their experience and imagination. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/qualmethone.html

Actors and Contexts – Phenomenological Analysis of participant responses to the People e-Delhi Study

2009-02-18T16:53:00.016Z

Round 5, Q1 RM doesn’t require the understanding or involvement of senior managers. RM should be seen as basic organisational infrastructure, like water or computers.

Q2 ERM needs to be pervasive in the organisation, hidden in the background, by use of systems transparent to the user.
These questions focus on the organizational actors—senior managers, records professionals, and staff in general—and on the contexts in which the RM function is found within organizations, contexts which both shape and are shaped by the perceptions of the people involved. Within these contexts, other actors are also present: IT, legal and other professionals and specialists who, like records professionals, have their own specific agendas and interactions with the corporate environment and with other corporate actors. ...
Read or download the full analysis from our website by clicking on the title link.

Phenomenological Analysis is applied to participant responses; this method provides subjective insights into a topic (phenomenon) through the researcher’s exploring it in depth using their experience and imagination. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/qualmethone.html

Crisis? Whose Crisis?

2009-02-12T16:08:00.003Z

In a couple of recent blog posts, Steve Bailey adopted his familiar role of agent provocateur, and succeeded in generating a flurry of discussion around the proposition that RM may be coming to the end of the line as a profession in its own right.

"The message [of the Dacre Review] seems pretty clear to me. The capture, management and maintenance of electronic records should now be considered an IT function, integrated within the mainstream of IT service delivery. … we have effectively allowed ourselves to be increasingly marginalized over recent years whilst the game moves on and upwards without us.

So, Records Managers, its time to open the office door, walk down the corridor to the Head of IT and pass the baton marked 'Records Management' over to him or her to deal with and for us to return to our warehouses full of paper and hanging files...”

But would we have found the Head of IT in their office down the corridor, or might they have been away on a mission to resolve their own professional existential angst? A news item in Ars Technica highlights a recent event to launch the ‘IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF)’:

"The event was a snapshot of a discipline in transition, and the assembled participants were trying to take charge of that transition in order to improve the status of IT while still retaining its identity as a coherent discipline. It's not clear to me that the latter is actually possible, but Microsoft, Intel, Chevron, BP, and the rest of the members of the Innovation Value Institute plan to try."

The introduction to this news item tells us that “IT is the ultimate thankless job”. But wait a minute – isn’t that our line? Aren’t IT the ones with the ‘Access All Areas’ passes to the Executive Suite, pouring their seductive ‘solutions’ into the ears of management, while records managers hang about forlornly on the outside, misunderstood and undervalued?

Whether either or both of these professions are facing a real identity crisis is a moot point, but it might help us to understand where IT is coming from – and to drop the not uncommon RM defensiveness and resentment in the face of its ‘favoured’ status – if we recognize that they, too, are assailed by some of the same fears and worries that beset us. We decry the ‘quick fixes’ offered by IT in place of robust RIM systems: but what if that is all they felt they could sell, that the real (subtle, complex, elegant, holistic) solutions they truly favoured would fall on deaf ears?

I don’t want to minimize the extent to which power imbalances within organizations are real rather than the results of selective perception (or even paranoia); still, it’s easier to get a clear view at eye level when the disciplinary drawbridges are lowered and the border guards taken off duty.

Records professionals do need to make that trip down the corridor to the Head of IT, but without the relay-runner’s baton. Instead, bring some tea and biscuits, and a willingness to discuss mutual strategies in the light not just of our own fears and anxieties but those of other constituencies within our organization as well. And it seems that the first step in walking that necessary mile in another's shoes shouldn’t be a difficult one to take – just turn and look in the mirror.

AC+erm is now on Twitter

2009-02-03T16:04:00.002Z

The Project has begun to tweet! You can find us at our twig on https://twitter.com/Northumbria_RM.

We will be using Twitter to post short news items or comments in parallel with the blog and website.

Project outputs – papers and presentations at conferences and other events

2008-12-08T16:24:00.004Z

Papers and presentations made at conferences, seminars, meetings, and similar events constitute a significant mode of disseminating Project findings and of seeking collaboration and support from further audiences.

We have now made the PDF files of slide presentations made at various events over the past two years available through our website at http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/conf_diss/. These slides relate to the following events (in reverse chronological order):

Conference Papers
Speaker: Prof Julie McLeod
Title: “Bridging the gap: adopting and adapting principles to advance practice”
Event: RMAA Conference 8–11 September 2008, Sydney, Australia.

Speaker: Prof Julie McLeod
Title: “Accelerating positive change in e-records management”
Event: Society of Archivists Conference 28 August 2008, York, England.

Speaker: Prof Julie McLeod
Title: “Records management principles & practice in the post-modern world”
Event: Records Management Society Conference 21–22 April 2008, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Speaker: Sue Childs / Prof Julie McLeod
Title: “Researching records management”, in 21st Century IS: Do Organisations Matter?
Event: UKAIS Conference 11–12 April 2007, Manchester, England.

Presentations
Speaker: Rachel Hardiman
Title: “The AC+erm Project: A Brief Tour”
Event: Records Management Society London Group meeting 19 November 2008, London, England.

Speaker: Prof Julie McLeod
Title: “Toolkits for Advancing Practice”
Event: RMAA Post Convention Seminar 24 September 2008, Perth, Australia.

Speaker: Prof Julie McLeod
Title: “Toolkits for Advancing Practice”
Event: RMAA Post Convention Seminar 16 September 2008, Melbourne, Australia.

Speaker: Prof Julie McLeod
Title: “ERM in a Web 2.0 world: accelerating positive change”
Event: IIM Seminar 11 September 2008, Sydney, Australia.

Speaker: Prof Julie McLeod
Title: “Electronic Records Management: accelerating the pace of change”
Event: Records Management Society, Scotland Group meeting 11 January 2007, Edinburgh, Scotland. [See also RMS website for meeting report by E Pringault-Adam http://www.rms-gb.org.uk/sigs/scotland/meetings/820]

First AC+erm colloquium

2008-12-08T15:03:00.012Z

The first colloquium for the AC+erm Project—focusing on the ‘People’ facet of the project—was held on 9 October last, in the impressive setting of the Wellcome Collection conference centre in London.Just under 50 delegates attended, adding to and extending the data from the e-Delphi data in a series of discussion forums

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/coll/coll1/

The Project colloquia perform two functions: firstly, they are used to collect further data in the form of contributions from delegates; secondly, they are one of the vehicles by which interim research results are disseminated and publicised. As with the Delphi Study panels, delegates are drawn from various stakeholder groups so that perspectives other than those of records professionals inform the research.

The first function works to validate and extend the Delphi Studies through face-to-face discussions between a larger audience of participants. The colloquia complement the e-Delphi Studies to provide a sound balance in terms of data collection enabling expert opinion, experience and views on each issue to be gathered and practical solutions to be shared and refined. They also further one of the project aims of building partnerships within and beyond the records professions.

The October colloquium started off with an introduction from the project team on the research project itself; further dissemination served to punctuate and serve as a framework for the ‘hard labour’ exacted from the delegates in the course of three discussion forums. These forums addressed the ‘People’ issues and solutions that had emerged from the Systematic Literature Review and the e-Delphi Study.

Delegates were asked (i) to refine and add to these existing outputs, and (ii) to make suggestions / proposals for developing vignettes and their appropriate audiences. The vignettes are a form of output that crystalises aspects of the research findings in the form of tools or exemplars that can be of use to practitioners, users and other stakeholders. Possibilities so far mooted range from the simplicity of a postcard-sized aide memoire to the sophistication of a video game.

For the discussion forums, delegates were split into a number of groups, each of which contained representatives from more than one stakeholder group and sat at a separate table to facilitate discussion and exchange. The team had planned for a worst-case scenario where everyone just sat and Iistened; we need not have worried, as the delegates pitched in with a will and engaged animatedly with the issues.

Forum 1—Delegates were asked to consider and comment on the full list of issues from the SLR and e-Delphi, and to add any issues they felt were missing.

Forum 2—Delegates were asked to choose the issue that most interested them, and to form discussion groups with others who had chosen the same issue. They commented on the solutions that had been proposed through the e-Delphi study, and made proposals for vignettes and audiences for these vignettes.

Forum 3—This exercise was similar to that carried out in Forum 2, but this time the issue for discussion was allocated to the delegate groups rather than chosen by them. Once more, they commented and suggested vignettes—one particularly inventive group whipped up a game of ‘Records Management Snakes and Ladders’ on the spot.

In each forum, the delegates were asked to make notes and/or appoint a rapporteur to report back from the discussion; the initial issues/solutions list plus the collated notes of the rapporteurs and individual delegates form the outputs from the colloquium. These outputs can be viewed in the ‘Dissemination’ area of our website at
http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/coll_diss/coll1_diss/

Feel free to comment on the colloquium or on any aspect of the AC+erm project—the more feedback we get, the more we are able to ensure that the project reflects the living as well as the ideal aspects of e-records and e-recordkeeping. And, of course, there is the challenge of the snakes and ladders to stimulate the artist or designer in you …

Project news – what have we been up to?

2008-12-08T14:45:00.001Z

Although we haven’t recently blogged about AC+erm activity, both the Project team and the various participants in our research have been kept busy behind the scenes. So it’s time to draw back the curtains and bring you up to date with what has been going on.

We will be making a series of posts over the next week or two relating to individual items such as our successful Project colloquium in London and various outputs from the project recently added to our website.

We will also be putting out some of our previous analyses, already available on the website, as blog posts. One method we used to analyse data from the People facet of the Project was that of the Phenomenological Analysis; as this is a form of analysis through which the researcher subjectively explores issues raised by the data, it is admirably suited to publication as a blog post available for further comment and discussion.

There has been quite a lot of discussion in the records-related blogosphere over the last couple of months on various issues related to ERM; if people haven’t lost their appetite for discussion, they might be interested in pitching in here as well.

Help us identify the solutions to the people issues of ERM

2008-09-12T09:44:00.002Z

Would you help us by completing an online survey?

An e-Delphi study with a group of stakeholders (records professionals, senior managers, IT specialists and employees in different sectors and countries) identified over 30 core people issues in accelerating electronic records management and suggested a number of potential solutions to address them.

But, which of these solutions are most likely to succeed? We want to discover how other stakeholders/people rate them in terms of their desirability, feasibility, impact, priority, and immediacy of action, based on their experience and perspective.

We have set up an online survey at smart-survey. Completing this survey will help us to help you and others identify the solutions most likely to work and accelerate positive change in managing electronic records. It should take you about 20 minutes to complete and only requires ticking boxes and selecting options from drop down menus.

To start the survey just click on this link:

http://www.smart-survey.co.uk/v.asp?i=7199ouubj

You do not have to complete the survey all at once; it is possible to log out and return without losing information already entered.

Many thanks for your help: we look forward to your answers.

Interim Findings from the People e-Delphi

2008-09-05T11:07:00.004Z

The Delphi studies gather primary data from selected participants (~20 people) and develop a picture of ‘expert opinion'. The use of electronic means enables anonymous and geographically wide participation.

To date, the first e-Delphi study—for the People facet—has been carried out.

Participants responded to five rounds of questions to identify, explore, and clarify the issues of the people and human aspects of ERM, such as: vision; awareness; culture; drivers and barriers.

We have analysed the participants' responses using a range of different approaches (subject themes, numerical ratings, subjective explorations) to provide a 360-degree view of the data. We have also produced outputs in textual, numerical, graphical and diagrammatic forms to support different cognitive styles.

Interim outputs for this phase are available on the Project website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/delphi_diss/people_dis/

These outputs take the following form:

All rounds – list of questions

Round 1 – preliminary thematic analysis of issues (text)
The participants were presented with a list of the people issues identified from the systematic literature review (see the Project website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/diss/diss_slr/ for the interim results from the review). They were asked to refine these issues and to add in any extra issues. These issues were then analysed to identify themes. The responses provided by the e-Delphi participants were in a rich, discursive form – a single sentence often presented complex situations or ideas. In order to ‘unpack’ the responses and break them down to units more amenable to analysis and the identification of themes, we created a controlled vocabulary of standardised terms and adapted a form of facet classification to present these terms in the context they appeared.

Round 3 – ranking of issues in terms of urgency/importance (graphs and tables)
The final list of issues were organised under groups of similar themes. The participants were asked to rank these groups from 1 to 8 (1 being most urgent and 8 being least urgent). Then, from all the individual issues listed, they were asked to select the single most urgent one to address for accelerating change in ERM. The results were analysed to give weighted numerical scores.

Round 4 – solutions to issues: approaches that work and approaches to avoid (PDF files of mind-maps, including text-only version; word clouds)
The participants were presented with a list of issues (i.e. headings that summarised the groups of issues from the previous rounds), comprising:

Issue 1: Executives and management lack understanding of records management and their role within that
Issue 2: Records professionals need appropriate knowledge/skills, approaches and relationships for the e-environment
Issue 3: Records Management and Information Management: principles and practices need to be a valued and integral part of the organisation
Issue 4: Staff, users: lack understanding of records management and their role within that
Issue 5: Implementation of ERM and systems requires change and change management
Issue 6: E-environment: has changed the nature of work and workplace relationships
Issue 7: ERM systems: need to well designed
Issue 8: Other professionals: lack understanding of records management and their role within that
Issue 10: Records/information management needs to be part of an organisation’s culture to the same extent as quality assurance
Issue 11: Integration/interoperability of ERM systems with other systems/processes is needed

For each issue, they were asked, from their own perspective and experiences, to suggest (a) solutions worth trying and (b) solutions to avoid. These solutions were thematically analysed and have been presented in two forms: (a) as mind maps, and (b) as word clouds.

Round 5 – phenomenological analyses of participant responses (text)
Phenomenological analysis (PA) is a method of obtaining subjective insights into a topic (phenomenon) by the researcher exploring it in depth using their experience and imagination. A number of these analyses also synthesise respondent responses from previous rounds. A topic is explored by considering it from a range of aspects: pieces and parts in space; episodes and sequences in time; qualities and dimensions; settings and environments; prerequisites and consequences; perspectives and approaches; cores and fringes; appearances and disappearances; clarity. (These aspects are derived from: Boeree CG. Qualitative methods: Part One. Chapter Two. Phenomenological description. Shippensburg University, 1998. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/qualmethone.html). The topics covered comprise:

Actors-Contexts
Bottom Line
Change Management
Cultural Change
Essential Skills
Management Class Change
Turf Wars

Colloquium - ERM: Tackling the People Issues Together

2008-09-05T08:49:00.008Z

Accelerating positive change in electronic records management
Tackling the People Issues Together

Project Colloquium
9 October 2008, Wellcome Trust, London

Wellcome Collection Conference Centre (Franks and Steel Rooms)
183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE

Most companies say their most important assets are their people, but few behave as if this were true. Change projects typically devote the lion's share of their budgets to technology and processes, not staff issues.
Dawson, MJ and Jones, ML ‘Herding Cats: Human Change Management’ (PwC, n.d.)

How are we tackling the people issues/aspects of managing e-records?
Have we got it right?
Are you searching for new approaches/ideas?
Do you want to find out what solutions are worth trying and which ones should be avoided?

Are you a records/information professional in search of solutions to managing e-records?
Are you a manager wanting to make effective use of your organisation’s information assets?
Are you an IT specialist wanting to implement ERM systems and demonstrate their success?
Are you an employee who wants systems designed to meet your needs and be easy to use?

Then this meeting is a chance for you to learn, influence, share, benchmark and contribute to the challenge of positive change in managing our e-information assets by taking part in a series of discussion forums. Take away fresh insights and benefit from trans-disciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives and expertise.

Agenda

12.00-12.30 Lunch

12.30-13.00

Introduction
* The AC+erm project - initial findings

Discussion Forum One : Identifying the people issues
* Have we got them right? * Have we identified them all?

Discussion Forum Two : In search of solutions
* What is worth trying? * What should be avoided?

15.00-15.20 Tea

15.20-15.15

Discussion Forum Three : Successful solutions
* How can we ensure they work?

16.15-16.30 Summary & next steps

Our research is focused on electronic records management, not records managers, and on the perspectives of all stakeholders who create and use records. So consider bringing another colleague with you to the meeting or recommending to them that they attend in their own right. For example, if you are a records professional, perhaps someone on your implementation project group, an IT or administrative staff member with whom you have liaised, a senior manager who has expressed an interest, or a lunch-time companion whose ideas appeal to you or make you think.

The registration form is available on the Project website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/coll/coll1/

Interim results are available on the Project website http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/acerm/

ERM – it’s up for debate

2008-07-30T15:37:00.003Z

We’ve been working with a group of experts via a Delphi study to explore the people aspects of designing an organisation-centred architecture for ERM. (See our post on the 9 April 2008 ‘Designing an Architecture – the People Facet’ for further details.)

We thought that a few of the questions arising from that work would prove interesting topics for discussion on the blog.

Valuing RM?

The importance and value of information needs to be recognised by staff before they will value RM practices. The focus needs to be on their own individual activities and the benefits of information/records management to them.

How can this individual focus be achieved across all the different staff groups?
Would other methods (not necessarily individually focused) also work?

RM – cuddly or not?

RM/IM need to be respected as essential functions but you don’t need to make them likable.

ERM – is it essential?

ERM needs to be seen as essential for the survival and success of an organisation; a competitive advantage not a burden.

Is this true?
If so, how do you sell this?
How could this be achieved?

Theory – no change there then?

The traditional RM principles and theories from the paper world are not fully applicable in the electronic environment.

Which principles and theories are not applicable?
Which are applicable?
And why?

Getting out there

The e-environment requires a proactive approach by records professionals.

What would such an approach entail?

ERM and people issues

2008-06-12T10:38:00.004Z

Interim results from the systematic literature review

The interim results from the systematic literature review covering ‘people issues’ are now available from the project website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/slr/ 56 articles were reviewed. An overview of the issues discussed is as follows:

Societal and national issues

Need to cover societal issues related to recordkeeping and e-records

Need to build national e-records management (ERM) infrastructure, and embed ERM into e-government programmes

Professional issues

Records professionals struggling with ERM

Records professionals’ records management (RM) role threatened by other professions as ERM emerges

Records professionals need to develop their IT/ERM skills

Other professions/stakeholders have different perceptions of ERM compared with records professionals

Need to extend RM/ERM knowledge to other professions
Need partnership working between records / information management (IM) / information systems / IT professionals

Users/staff

Personalisation of corporate records in e-environment: end users see the records as ‘theirs’, not as a corporate resource

Control of e-communication conflicts with the spontaneity and informality that make it so useful and popular in the first place

RM/IM is not a high priority for staff

Staff need training in RM basics

Need for user-friendly ERM systems (ERMS)

ERM/ERMS implementation

ERM causes change in organizational status, relationships between managers and workers, and work practices

Resistance to organizational and cultural changes caused by ERM

Change management needed when implementing ERM

ERM implementation requires:

strategic development, good planning, leadership and organisational commitment, staff involvement and cooperative working, staff awareness raising and training

Many of the problems facing ERMS implementation are behavioural rather than technical
The results of the systematic literature review are informing the data collection phases of the project. The first data collection phase - Designing an Architecture, the People Facet - is being conducted via a series of e-Delphis. The findings from the systematic literature review on people issues determined the initial topics discussed in these e-Delphis.

New publication: Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications

2008-06-05T07:58:00.001Z

Email is “not quite as dangerous as a chainsaw being wielded by a drunken person in a crowded shopping mall, but…it is a powerful tool…”

“when people join your organisations, they should take the email test”

“there are organisations that would rather keep everything because it’s easier”, and

“we’ve invested in technology without thinking about the long term implications and funding those implications as part of a life-cycle of the investment”

are just some of the sound bites in the proceedings of the 2nd Northumbria University International Witness Seminar Conference, 2007.

Held in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications - Exploring strategies with Experts was an innovative event that gathered experts from around the world to discuss the business, people and technology perspectives of managing email records.

To find out who said these words and hear the views of the experts gathered (including Reynolds Cahoon, Adrian Cunningham, Jonathan Downes, Heather Jack, John McDonald, Martin Sanderson and Ian Wooler) order a copy of the conference proceedings today. The printed proceedings contain the (edited) verbatim content of the entire event and a CD of the proceedings in searchable form, the audio recording of the witnesses and photographs.

Cost: 49.00 Sterling or 25.00 Sterling for full-time students, including post & packaging. To order send the following details to sarah.howells@northumbria.ac.uk

· Contact name
· Name of organisation to be invoiced
· Address
· Number of copies

The Nature of Information – A Workshop Report

2008-04-26T10:36:00.005Z

This opportunity to meet with information professionals discussing future fields of information development took place in lovely and appropriate surroundings.
The 8th Social Study of ICT workshop (SSIT8) at LSE on 25th April was a well-attended event that concentrated on the problems of the relationships of information to data, and the real-world treatment of the mass of information and data which both information professionals and companies are expected to deal with on a daily (if not moment-to-moment) basis.

After an inspirational keynote speech by Albert Borgmann, the events that followed were a pattern of talks and panel sessions where all speakers were able to offer new facets on our interpretations of the ‘Organizational Consequences of Information Growth’ (Panel 1) and ‘Information, Memory and Culture’ (Panel 2). The latter was a lively and comprehensive conclusion to the day.

Definitive highlights were John Gantz’s informative and descriptive report on ‘The Expanding Information Universe’ – a report which should be read by anyone intent on proving to their CEO that email storage space isn’t quite as simple as we can believe – the concept of calculating the impact of an email should have prompted everyone to reconsider their email strategy.

Lev Manovich’s impressive presentation on visual digital culture described another facet of information whilst impressing upon us the potential of a graphically evaluated technological culture, the benefits, and the rich potential of such evaluation.

Other notable points were the well-reasoned panel presentations of Mireille Hildebrandt on data mining in the terms of the law, and Jannis Kallinikos’ part-allegorical and meta-hypertextual exploration of ‘Living in Ephemeria’.

It is to be hoped that by the amount of serious networking during the conference there is a follow-up to this event next year, that is assuming our capacity for information hasn’t exceeded our memory of how vital a resource information is to our fellow professionals.

Opportunity to participate in a Northumbria University records management research project

2008-04-15T08:36:00.002Z

Elizabeth Lomas (elizabeth.lomas@unn.ac.uk) of Northumbria University, is conducting a research project aimed at exploring the relevance and usefulness of records management constructs within Information Communication Systems (email, Facebook etc).

The project, undertaken by means of-co-operative action research, is entitled:
Continued Communication: confronting the challenges of managing records/data held within information communication systems.

The aims of the project are to:

evaluate the nature of records within the context of Information Communication Systems;
determine how records management theory can be developed to influence recordkeeping practice;
evaluate the relevance of other business tools for optimizing information value (e.g. risk management, performance measurement etc);
explore methods for enhancing user engagement with relevant records management concepts

Elizabeth is looking for records management practitioners, and other users of information systems with a wide range of expertise, to volunteer to participate in this research.

As a participant you would become part of a group that critically examines and reflects upon their own use of such systems. This will involve occasional face to face meetings (in London) and networking through Google groupware. All participants will have an equal opportunity to direct the research’s development and direction. Participants will engage in a personal capacity and therefore corporate permission is not required. All participants will be duly credited for their participation unless total anonymity is requested. All comments will be duly anonymised, as requested.

Participation benefits include:

the opportunity to network with peers;
insights into a research project and research programmes generally;
information on the role of records management in the context of different types of information and communication systems, including Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook;
references to key articles and literature, to aid discussions;
the opportunity for additional training, as identified by the participants.

Please pass on this message to any contacts who might be keen to participate in the user group.

The study will support Northumbria University’s AHRC funded AC+erm project.

Please email Elizabeth if you would be willing to participate or if you have any further questions at elizabeth.lomas@unn.ac.uk.

Designing an Architecture – the People Facet

2008-04-09T10:57:00.002Z

We are currently working on the first stage of the investigative phase of the project. This comprises exploring three facets of designing an organisation-centred architecture for ERM - people issues, understanding work processes and systems, and technologies.
http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/arch/

The first facet – People – includes vision, awareness, culture, drivers and barriers.

The investigations will be conducted using a combination of e-Delphi studies and face-to-face colloquia involving an appropriate mix of experts, disciplines and recordkeeping stakeholders. The Delphi studies will build upon our findings from the systematic literature review. Using the review findings as a starting point, they will gather primary data from selected participants and develop a picture of ‘expert opinion’ on each facet. The colloquia, to be held in different parts of the UK, will validate and extend the Delphi studies through face-to-face discussions between more participants. The end result will be vignettes, placed in the public domain, of issues and solutions.

As this phase progresses, look on our Blog / Website for interim findings.

Delphi Technique

The ‘classic’ Delphi technique comprises setting up a panel of experts. The members are kept anonymous from each other, although each is known to the researcher. This anonymity is a key factor as it prevents a ‘powerful’ person from dominating the group and also prevents the pressures for group conformity - people are free to fully express their views. Questionnaires are used, originally paper, and each expert communicates individually with the researcher. The first round is a set of open questions to derive as many views and issues as possible. These are analysed qualitatively by the researcher to develop a set of themes. In the second round these themes are then presented in a structured questionnaire and the experts are asked to rank or rate them using a scoring technique. The results are analysed quantitatively and the themes ordered by their rank value, with the use of dispersion estimates such as standard deviation to show divergence. These results are then presented in a third round for a further set of ranking and reanalysis. Sometimes further rounds are used. The end result is a convergence of the findings to the central tendency, or a ‘consensus’, with an estimate of the degree of deviation from this central tendency.

We have amended the technique for our purposes in a number of ways: (i) collecting data through electronic means; (ii) not seeking to ‘force’ consensus, but rather to explore both consensus and divergence; (iii) capturing the richness of the discussion through an emphasis on qualitative analysis, though we also use quantitative analysis were applicable.

We’re not aware of many uses of Delphi studies in RM – we’ve used it ourselves in previous research. If you know of any, do let us know.

Horizon Scanning using Delphi Methodology

An interesting use of the Delphi technique we’ve come across is in the annual horizon scanning of emerging technologies for use in learning-focused organizations.
http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2008-Horizon-Report.pdf

The process involves an Advisory Board of experts who: (i) undertake a comprehensive review of research and literature in the field; (ii) discuss and brainstorm the results of the review to end up with a list of technologies; (iii) go through an iterative Delphi process to rank the technologies and to place them on to an adoption horizon.

The results for the 2008 report are:

Horizon: One Year or Less - Grassroots video; Collaboration Webs
Horizon: Two to Three Years – Mobile Broadband; Data Mashups
Horizon: Four to Five Years – Collective Intelligence; Social Operating Systems

AC+erm custom Google search engine for ERM

2008-02-05T16:26:00.000Z

http://google.decenturl.com/acerm-search

We have added a customized Google search engine for electronic records to our Resources section in the right-hand panel (scroll down and you will find it).

The engine currently searches 93 sites, ranging from national archives to individual blogs, taking in such resources as professional associations and academic journals along the way.

We hope that this will provide a useful starting point for anyone interested in searching for solid information concerning electronic recordkeeping, while excluding the usual irritating false drops and advertising junk.

Naturally, we will have left out many sites, perhaps even some glaringly obvious ones. We therefore hope that you will collaborate with us by letting us know of any further websites that might help fill the gaps.

2020 Vision?

2008-01-14T12:29:00.000Z

[Note: what follows are my individual musings, and do not necessarily represent the views of the AC+erm team as a whole.]

A train of thought that was developing in a vague way in my mind and through discussion with others, until it was derailed by the demands of the festive season, has been started again by reading through the current issue of the Records Management Bulletin. It contains an article by Geoff Smith, with the title ‘Welcome to my Nightmare! The Paperless Office of 2020’. (Before going any further, I wish to make it absolutely clear that this post is in no way critical of the substance of Geoff’s article, which is informative and lively. It is simply that the ‘packaging’, as it were, brought back to mind my pre-Christmas thoughts.)

The article is illustrated with some nifty and professional Halloween- and horror-themed artwork, and contains a further internal subheading ‘The Office of 2020, or Welcome to my Nightmare!’ And it seems to me that a significant proportion of our professional literature and debate on electronic records, documents, and technologies is couched in similar terms, even where the message (as in Geoff’s article) is at least as much concerned with the positive as with the problematic aspects of the digital age. Digital technologies are described in terms of ‘nightmares’, ‘problems’ or, when attempting a more positive note, ‘challenges’; we are warned that we cannot stand still, that these changes will come about whether we want them or not, that we must get on the bus now if we are not to be left behind. What we never seem to contemplate is the possibility that we might actually drive the bus ourselves.

The new technologies – now including the possibilities opened up by Web 2.0 – have radically changed the way that businesses and individuals use and exchange information. They have been seized on avidly (with the facilitation of an IT sector with little or no comprehension of records management or archival concerns) and are being exploited and deployed in the haphazard, chaotic ways with which we are all too familiar, and which form the core of the ‘challenges’ we try to address.

What is too often lost sight of is that this is the chaos of creativity, of individuals and groups experimenting with, exploiting, and delighting in some of the most powerful and potentially empowering tools ever put at the disposal of human ingenuity. Why does it sometimes seem that everyone – from teenagers in their bedrooms to ‘silver surfers’ in their dens, from multi-national corporations to sole traders operating out of their spare rooms, from CEOs to clerical assistants – sees a world of opportunity and possibility where recordkeepers see only problems and obstacles? We worry about how to stop staff from using e-mail or instant messaging or Facebook, when we might have been there at the outset to suggest the technologies to our organizations as innovative ways for creating, sharing and maintaining the information and records needed to carry out business and to preserve corporate and societal memory, while presenting strategies to ensure that their use was compliant with good practice.

For the opportunities are not just opportunities for business but for the records professions, too. In a 1999 article in American Archivist, (‘Integrated Archives and Records Management Programs at Professional Membership Associations: A Case Study and a Model’), Stephen Wagner presents an excellent model and toolkit for managing the records of a highly dispersed national association of over 25,000 nursing professionals, run with a minuscule part-time or voluntary administration throughout the US. This was written in the context of a largely paper environment; think how the recordkeeping requirements of such a body could now be revolutionized by the new technologies! Documents, databases, presentations, and discussions made instantly available for collaboration or sharing on the web through online services and applications provided by, e.g., Scribd, Zoho, Google Docs or Apps. Virtually cost-free video and telephone conferencing through instant messaging services. A free hosted online central repository for all organizational records and documents, cutting out endless sending and hoarding of duplicates in the forms of attachments. The ultimate shared working area; out of the information and organizational silos in one great leap. Easily attainable, too: most of the people likely to read this post could set the whole technological side of it up themselves over the course of a weekend. Of course, there are concerns and difficulties to be addressed; the digital world is not Shangri-La. But the paper world was hardly Utopia either, however rosy it may seem in our retrospective imaginings.

What we are going through is not merely a technological revolution; it is a recordkeeping revolution as well. Yet how often have these possibilities first been brought to the fore by records managers or archivists rather than IT managers or, indeed, individual technologically savvy users? Nine times out of ten, the potential outlined in the previous paragraph – for any organization – will have been raised by someone else, with Records playing the defensive role of pointing out the pitfalls and problems, presenting lugubrious catalogues of Enron-style fiascos as an Awful Warning to the executive board. We need to be the revolutionaries; we need to be the ones placing these solutions on the table first, and letting IT, Legal and the rest play the “Yes, but …” role for a change. We have too often ended up scrabbling around looking for the ‘records angle’ in proposed initiatives, rather than boldly putting forward the initiatives ourselves in the first place and letting others look for their angles. Could this, as well as sheer ignorance, be part of the reason why senior management turns to IT rather than Records Management for solutions to RIM problems?

In posting this, it is not at all my intention to trivialize the difficulties faced in managing records in the modern world or organization; the aim is to stimulate discussion, not to provide a nuanced assessment of the issues involved. But there are prizes out there as well as perils, and it may be that to win them, to make a real investment in the future, the records professions need to make a New Year’s resolution to sell off their shares in nightmares and build up their holdings in dreams.

Seasons Greetings

2007-12-11T11:15:00.000Z

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

First Expert Panel Meeting

2007-11-30T15:41:00.000Z

The AC+erm Project’s First Expert Panel Meeting was held on 23^rd October at Northumbria University. The role of the Expert Panel is to peer review the research process and ongoing findings.

The Panel is drawn from Northumbria University staff, Visiting Professors, and the local area, plus two international RM experts, one from Australia, one from Canada. The 14 Panel members cover all the four stakeholder groups in recordkeeping (i.e. executives/senior managers, records professionals, IT/systems administrators and recordkeepers). They represent a wide range of disciplines and public and private sectors, i.e. the disciplines of Built Environment, Business/Finance, Computer Science, Design, Engineering, Health, History, Information Sciences, Information Systems, and the sectors of Higher Education, Central Government, Consultancy, IT, Law, Local Government.

The topics discussed at the meeting comprised:

Overview of Project
Systematic Literature Review

Methodology
Summary of Interim Results

Designing an architecture
Next Stages of the Project

Inputs - Engaging Participants
Outputs – Engaging Vignettes

1. Systematic Literature Review Interim Results
See the previous post for details.

2. Designing an architecture?
The focus of this project is designing an organisation-centred architecture for electronic records management (ERM) from three perspectives: (i) people, including vision, awareness, culture, drivers and barriers; (ii) working practices including processes, procedures, policies and standards; and (iii) technology in terms of the design principles for delivering effective recordkeeping. The members of the Expert Panel were asked: But what does architecture mean in the context of the problems and issues we are investigating? What do we need to consider in designing an organisation-centred architecture? What do you see as architecture from your perspective (representing a specific stakeholder group / discipline)? What does it mean to you?

If you want to answer these questions add a comment to this post or email us on eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk

(2) Engaging participants?

In the next phase of the project, starting in January 2008, we will be exploring the people perspective of ERM. We will do this via electronic/telephone Delphi studies and face-to-face colloquia. We will be wanting to have participants from all the stakeholder groups (i.e. senior managers, records professionals, IT/systems administrators and recordkeepers) and from a wide range of disciplines and sectors. The Expert Panel were asked for any suggestions on engaging such participants in the project. This could be named individuals/organisations that could act as contact points, or strategies to engage a specific stakeholder group, e.g. for executive managers we would need to demonstrate how they would benefit from participating in our project, or ways of contacting a specific stakeholder group, e.g. some people prefer face to face/telephone contact others email.

If you have any suggestions, please add a comment to this post or email us on eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk

(3) Engaging our audience?
We aim to output our interim findings at stages during the project so we can engage our audience and enable positive change in ERM. We plan to produce a series of vignettes, i.e. stories or pictures, that present our findings about the important issues that need addressing and any practical solutions identified. These vignettes could be e.g. a textual narrative, a set of images, a 'rich picture', a sound bite from a discussion. They could be presented e.g. via our blog/Web site, or emailed to organisations/discussion lists/individuals, or produced as leaflets. The Expert Panel were asked for any suggestions on the format/style/method of dissemination of such vignettes for specific stakeholders/disciplines/sectors.

If you have any suggestions, please add a comment to this post or email us on eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk

Systematic Review – Interim Findings

2007-11-30T14:46:00.000Z

The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is being conducted to the schema provided by the NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/report4.htm. The first stage of the review comprised establishing the review protocol, piloting search strategies, setting up an Access database for data extraction and analysis and an Endnote library to manage the references. The Access database includes fields for: characterising the literature, e.g. date, author sector type, country (author); weighting the quality of the items, i.e. resource type, approach/study type, reviewer evaluation; identifying the aspect covered, e.g. model for ERM, functional requirements; summary section for detailed input.

Searches have been carried out on computerised databases covering the information/records management (LISA) and business (EBSCO, ISI) literature, obtaining 795, 271 and 214 references respectively (after rejection of false hits (1,637) and duplicates (99)) - a total of 1,280 items. A sample of 50 items was reviewed independently by the three reviewers on the project team and demonstrated adequate consistency in selection and extraction. Continual discussion about interpretation and use of a criteria definition log maintains this consistency. To date ~35% (n=451) of the references have been reviewed, with a selection rate of ~50% for data extraction. At this rate data will be extracted from approx. 640 items (mostly journal articles). A later phase of the review will cover the grey literature.

Interim quantitative and qualitative analyses were presented to the Expert Panel meeting, and have been made publicly available on the project Website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/slr/?view=Standard. The quantitative analysis described the characteristics of the literature; the qualitative analysis looked at the critical success factors for the implementation of electronic records management systems (ERMS) in organisations.

“Not Quite As Dangerous As A Chainsaw” – The Use of Training

2007-11-27T12:56:00.000Z

"Other professionals, other users - we need to get them involved" -
Chair commenting on someone's comments from the 24/10/07 session

“The act, process, or method of one that trains b: the skill, knowledge, or experience acquired by one that trains.”
Merriam-Webster, Incorporated (2006-2007) Definition of training – Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Available at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/training (Accessed: 21/11/07)

“An organizational and personal tool…and as a tool, it’s only as useful, or as useless, beneficial, or dangerous, as the skill or knowledge of the user allow(s). It’s obviously not quite as dangerous as a chainsaw being wielded by a drunken person in a crowded shopping mall, but…it is a powerful tool…”
Catherine Hare. 25/11/07

This very strong image gives us a specific reason why training should be a considered concept with the use of email. Any tool will require the establishment of a basic training routine. However, with the use of email comes the concept of a tool which can be put to multiple purposes. Not only can email be used as a work tool, which can be applicable within and without the company, it also can have a function where it acts as a personal communication service, a repository for information, and has the potential to be either misused or abused.

We have heard that email archiving software can be a quick fix. If we can talk possessively about email – ‘my inbox’ - then we are in need of training and guidance in order that we feel that we are in charge of our email, and not the other way round. Training acknowledges there are standards: compliance has ‘raised the bar’.

Clearly, what we need is a method by which we can establish the key skills of email within the company so that email does become a ‘beneficial’ tool rather than the chainsaw of the example.

Training should first and foremost inform and teach. Training should look at enabling the trainee to behave in an appropriate manner with the tool, and to be corrected when it is not used appropriately to ensure that negligent or malicious behaviour does not go uncorrected. Email abuse (ranging from harassment of employees and colleagues to issues such as spam, or the inadvertent divulgence of sensitive information) can constitute this behaviour.

In order to ensure that users can work with this tool, training should be developed and given. Training can reinforce positive values and training will not reward abuse and misuse of email. It has been suggested that users should undertake an ‘email health check’ – especially in the light of the amount of email accounts that some professionals handle. Another suggestion is an email driving licence - 'licence to email'.

How would one of these training regimes be built? One suggestion on how to deal with abuse of email, and abuse by using email, is ‘the three degrees’:

1. “Having a good, workable communications policy”

This point extols the virtues of communication, and being able to explain – one of the most important aspects of training – why members of a company are not permitted to go outside the regulations for acceptable IT use. The ‘preparation of a workable policy’

2. “…having a good grievance policy in place”

Solving problems and acknowledging any grievances that those in the company may have when training is not followed, such as breech of policy.

3. “…having the bravery to go through discipline procedure with those people who’ve breeched policies…”

In order to maintain a policy about the way that email will work, it has to be made clear that the rules cannot be bent.

How, and when, should we establish training needs and activities in the workplace? Are they to be administered like a basic skill, or as a reinforcement of what we already know?

Keep everything?

2007-11-27T11:18:00.000Z

In my opening introduction at our Witness Conference on the challenges of managing email, I quoted from an article by Adam Gifford (New Zealand Herald, 14 March 2007): “emails can’t be thrown away.” Email ‘archiving’ software is often marketed on the fact that retention of email doesn’t need to managed closely, that everything can easily be retained and, importantly, easily retrieved. But I asked (rhetorically) “surely I’m not the only person here who has trouble with the concept of needing to keep all emails for legal or any other purposes?”

In a later seminar the notion of ‘keeping everything’ was raised and lead to some real debate.

What are the arguments for keeping all emails vs managing their retention according to value, record series etc? What are the benefits and the risks? Which approach do you support and why?

E-communications and changing organizational contexts

2007-11-26T16:43:00.000Z

One strand of thought started at October's Witness Seminar Conference explored the idea that the use and management of e-communications could not be considered in isolation from the changing nature of organizations and organizational culture; that the now multifarious and ubiquitous e-communication technologies and practices have both shaped and been shaped by such changes, and that this has profound implications for the way in which records management programmes should be conceived and implemented. A couple of aspects of this theme are summarized here.

There has been a shift from traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic and largely monolithic business organizations to a networked model involving multiple organizations in multiple jurisdictions. This has been largely enabled through the communications revolution brought about by the use of e-mail and more recent technologies. The processes of a given business function – and the records of those processes – are spread well beyond a single organization, yet many records management programmes are still conceptualized in terms more suited to the traditional organization.

Who owns the records of these processes? Will there come a time when records managers have responsibility for managing a process, or group of processes, across organizational boundaries rather than for managing all the records of a single organization? Of what value is compliance as a ‘big stick’ when the global organization can simply shift operations to more lightly regulated jurisdictions?

A parallel change has occurred in the relationship between organizations and their staff, effectively altering the ‘psychological contract’ entered into by both parties, and in the nature of the work carried out by an increasing number of employees. Again, e-communication technologies both reflect and help power these changes. The organization no longer offers secure employment and employees are, in response, more individualistic and less corporate in their approach to the information and records they create, use and manage. They see these records as their own resource, and as part of the knowledge capital to be accumulated and carried on to their next job.

Furthermore, many employees are now knowledge workers who may work from many locations, including from home, and whose closest links and priorities may not be within their organization at all but with external entities – clients, funding bodies, suppliers, professional peers. This fragmentation of lines of responsibility and blurring of boundaries, coupled with a more individualistic and self-interested attitude to information and records, may require a re-evaluation of an approach to recordkeeping based primarily on corporate guidelines and obligations.

In the same way that the focus for records management may have to shift at the level of the overall business mission to managing the records of the process, not the organization, could it be that the recordkeeping responsibilities of employees will become a matter of individual contractual obligation, tailored to meet the needs and expectations of both employer and employee in each separate case?

Security v Sharing

2007-11-26T16:32:00.000Z

Any data packet sent across the network is vulnerable to a hacker, and even if encrypted can be decrypted relatively easily. Absolute security of information and access to information, e.g. via emails for sharing or for records management, are mutually excusive. You can't maximise both security and access; maximising one will minimise the other and vice versa. One Witness Seminar participant stated that if an email contains business critical information then it must have a security policy applied to and should not be shared; as soon as you start sharing information you have leakage. This statement caused immediate responses from other participants. One said that if you take away the point of sharing email you have no email. Another said that if you don’t share you have no business. In a construction project for example, sharing of information has to occur across organisational and often national boundaries. So how can we square this circle?

Witness Seminar on Email and E-Communications - The Debate Continues

2007-11-26T16:26:00.000Z

The University of Northumbria recently ran a successful Witness Seminar - Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications - in Newcastle on 24th to 25th October. The conference organisers were the AC⁺erm project team.

The Witness Seminar participants expressed an interest in continuing the debate on email and e-communications. We are therefore posting a few challenging topics that arose during the Seminar for further discussion on our AC⁺erm project blog. Please feel free to comment. If you want to start a new thread on a completely different topic, then just email us at eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk with the details. If the discussion proves popular, we've other threads from the Seminar to raise in the near future.

Witness Seminar 2007 http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/conf/wit07/?view=Standard
Witness Seminar 2006 http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/conf/wit06/?view=Standard

The AC⁺erm Project Team

Design parameters for ERM

2007-11-13T14:07:00.000Z

The results of a 1998-9 Delphi study with 30 e-record keeping experts identified value conflicts that could provide important design parameters for electronic records management (ERM). The study looked at the opportunities and risks of 5 different technologies for providing information for public sector accountability – email, database management systems (DBMS), office software, the Web, smart systems.

Email improves communication internally and with citizens. However, when used to produce messages that were previously produced on paper there is a risk that some of these will be lost. Conversely, where email replaces phone conversations, messages are kept that previously would have been transient. Email is characterised by individualised not organisational management and control.
DBMS provide an important source of management information. However they lack historical continuity when records are updated, and often lack contextual information about the origins of the dataset.
Office software is widely available and used. However, there is lack of organisational control over the creation and capture of records. New releases of software are incompatible with previous versions.
The Web is used for PR and increasingly for transactions. However, there is loss of historical information when pages updated, and often access to information is lost when links become broken. Data is vulnerable to hackers.
Smart systems, e.g. economic growth modelling software, solve specific problems. However, for accountability purposes, we need to know/document the logic/rules by which the decision is reached. Software obsolescence is a problem.

Analysis of these results identified five organisational value conflicts.

"'On the Record' and 'Off the Record' Communications Tend to Become Mixed: A Conflict Between Formality and Informality." (p.263)
"Control Over Information and Communication Tends to be Individualized: A Conflict Between Individual Autonomy and Organizational Control" (p.263)
"Focus Tends to be on Present Information Rather Than on Historic Information: A Conflict Between Adaptability and Continuity" (p.264)
"Information Tends to be Connected to Other Information Managed by Other People and Organizations: A Conflict Between Cooperation and Organizational Autonomy" (p.264)
"Rules and Procedures Tend to be Integrated in Computer Systems: A Conflict Between Artificial Authority and Intellectual Autonomy". (p.265)

These value conflicts could provide important design parameters for ERM. However, there is no way that these conflicts could have values that would produce a ‘one size fits all’ solution. The balance of these conflicts needs to be designed to fit a specific situation or organisational requirement. “Emphasis on certain values may lead to advantages in some accountability situations and disadvantage or failure to use new opportunities in others. No one best way can be identified, but situation specific designs are required.” (p.266)

Meijer A (2001). Electronic records management and public accountability: Beyond an instrumental approach. The Information Society, 17(4):259-270

Case example of archiving e-records

2007-10-02T09:30:00.000Z

Case examples make the issue of ERM come alive. An article by Dr Michael Wettengel, from the German Federal Archives, provides a fascinating case example highlighting the problems of e-record preservation. When Germany was unified, archivists faced the mammoth task of merging the former East German Central State archives with the West German Federal Archives. The e-records presented a number of significant problems, many of these the common issues for digital preservation.

Many, previously East German, agencies/institutions were dissolved or privatised. Others passed directly on to the equivalent Federal organisations – these records were easier to deal with as they fell immediately into the archivists hands. If an agency was dissolved the records and data documentation were often lost, or dispersed or went with the staff who left for other jobs. Only archives in these circumstances that were immediately locked at least ‘preserved’ what records and documentation there was. Privatised agencies regarded their records as commercial assets and often sold them or required the Federal Archive to pay fees to access and preserve them. When the archivists looked at the e-records themselves the following problems were encountered: records that had been maintained by large data processing centres using old-fashioned main frame technology; records that lacked documentation on data structures so they were effectively unreadable; storage media that had deteriorated to become unreadable or only partially readable. The job of the archivists became that of a detective, tracking down any type of documentation that could held them interpret the data structures. And finding staff from the old data processing centres who would act as consultants and pass on their knowledge of how the records were produced.

After a lot of hard work, much of the missing data documentation for the East German e-records was reconstructed. However, because of the specific hardware that was originally used to produce them, long term preservation of these records still present problems. Access is also a problem as many of the data files are now stored as flat files for long term preservation. So one of the Federal Archive’s tasks is producing ‘research copies’ that provide for user-friendly access.

Though German reunification presented a unique e-record preservation task that required immediate and emergency action, there are still warnings from this case example applicable to other countries and other organisations. Do you think we have the digital preservation problem sorted? Or do we have ‘archived’ e-records that were produced with out of data hardware and software, lacking data documentation, and stored on deteriorating media? Have we created a problem that sooner or later will confront us with a task that may require the same Herculean efforts of the Federal archivists? How much/what progress has been made in digital preservation since this article was written?

Some of the article’s conclusions make interesting reading:

"new situation helped to bring about a change in German archivist's attitudes towards electronic records … the necessity for a stronger commitment in that field." (p.11)

"creating organisations were not the best custodians of machine-readable archives … in a world where state and society are in constant transition, it makes sense to have archivists engaged in electronic records management and taking records of permanent value into their custody." (p.11)

“A lot of what is important for future archivists and researchers of data holdings will always be in private notebooks, or in the brains of systems administrators and records creators." (p.16)

Article:
Wettengel M (2000). Archiving the united Germany: 1. German reunification and electronic records: the example of East Germany’s ‘Kaderdatenspeicher’. Records Management Bulletin, (95):11-16

Been there, done that?

2007-09-25T13:35:00.000Z

As 21st-century recordkeepers grappling with the dilemma of long-term retention of born-digital documents – preserve in native format, or print to paper? – we may well consider the dilemma itself to be born digital, as it were. But concentration on the novelty of digital media masks a more persistent concern.

“Who does not know how great is the distance between script and print? Script if it is applied to parchment will be able to last for a thousand years, but print is a paper thing and how long will it last? Two hundred years at the most.”

(Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, in his De Laude Scriptorum of 1490, justifying his advice to monks to copy printed books onto parchment to ensure their long-term preservation.)

Trithemius is not the only commentator to prefigure the problems of the digital age, with its vast proliferation of material both official and unofficial, public and private – particularly the unofficial and private, the diaries, the online musings, the torrential (b)logorrhoea added daily in its terabytes of information overload. A quick step back to the future of 1621:

“New books every day, pamphlets, … stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies ... Now come tidings of … entertainments, … revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, … now comical, then tragical matters.”

“Any scurrile pamphlet is welcome to our mercenary stationers ...; they print all – cuduntque libellos In quorum foliis vix simia nuda cacaret”

(Robert Burton, preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy. The Latin – I translate more modestly than accurately – intimates that even a monkey would scarcely bother to use the effusions in question as a substitute for Andrex; a secondary use that rather eludes their web-based equivalents.)

If there is a serious point in this, it lies in the recognition of concerns and themes in the production, organization and preservation of information / records / documents that persist through major – even revolutionary – changes. And in the further recognition, that many of the ERM problems that are so exciting, challenging, or plain vexatious to us as contemporaries can only ever be judged in hindsight, a luxury not included in the package. We may not know until a far later date whether we are being confronted, on this project and elsewhere, with genuinely new, revolutionary, socio-technical phenomena or with fresh evolutionary forms of persistent concerns. But we may surely, with a bit of luck, avoid the task of copying our institutions’ paper records onto parchment …

Blogs as e-records

2007-05-24T10:00:00.000Z

Blogs are now fashionable. According to recent statistics from Technorati, there are over 70 million blogs, with about 120,000 new ones being set up every day http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html. Many of these are personal blogs - maybe the electronic ‘Pepys’ diary of the future is among them. Blogs are also being set up by organisations and individuals to cover work and professional issues. This raises the challenge of how to manage this new form of electronic record. An article by Dearstyne states that “most blogs are records, so sound records and information management principles must be applied”. He notes there are four main records and information management (RIM) implications:

(i) Education - about how organisations can use them to advantage
(ii) Policies - for running organisational blogs and guidelines for employees about content and language
(iii) RIM - decisions about whether an organisational blog is an official record. If it is then it needs to be managed as such “providing workable access, indexing tools, authenticity, preservation, appraisal, scheduling, storage, and access for as long as needed for administrative, legal, research, and other purposes. These issues need to be addressed before blogging begins.”
(iv) RIM applications - what purposes and functions could blogs support

Dearstyne concludes: “Blogging is a new force on the information stage; it is fluid and needs shaping. RIM managers must decide how to address it to ensure that blogs are managed as the records they are.” This article was written in late 2005. How are we meeting this challenge?

Article:
Dearstyne BW (2005). Blogs: the new information revolution? RIM professionals have an opportunity to provide leadership and guidance in the development of policies to ensure that blogs are managed as records. Information Management Journal, 39(5):38-44

Sue

ACERM Blog News

2007-05-22T07:56:00.000Z

We now have a short and simple URL for the ERM project. Please visit us
at:

www.northumbria.ac.uk/acerm

Opens in a new browser window or tab:
ACERM

Please keep visiting the blog for updates!

ERM Resource List.

2007-04-19T15:14:00.000Z

We have produced a list of resources (Web sites and documents) relevant to the topic of ERM. This is kept on our Project Web site: http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/resources/. The resources are organised in both chronological order of receipt and A/Z order of organisation/author. This list is not intended to be comprehensive. It will be updated as we discover new items of interest. If you have an item you would like us to add to this list please contact us at eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk or put a comment on the blog.

Sue

ACERM Blog News

2007-04-16T09:30:00.000Z

We have been made aware of a popup appearing on the blog. We are currently working to remove this unrelated advert and apologise for any inconvenience.

Welcome to the AC+erm project blog!

2007-03-30T14:18:00.001Z

AC+erm (Accelerating the pace of positive change in electronic records management) is the name of a research project being conducted by the School of Computing, Engineering & Information Sciences at Northumbria University from 2007-2009. The project team, lead by Julie McLeod, has posted a number of items to the blog to explain what the project is about, the role of this blog and how you can use it, as well as some other interesting items.

Please do use the blog, add comments to the posts and let us have your feedback on it. We look forward to ‘blogging’ with you.

Julie McLeod
Project Director

Introduction to the project

2007-03-30T14:16:00.001Z

Electronic records management (ERM) has been a significant issue for organisations for more than two decades. Despite guidelines, standards and software systems developed by national archives, coalitions, professional associations, research groups and commercial organisations the pace of change has been relatively slow (McDonald, 2005). The question is why?

This 3-year project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), will try to understand issues and develop practical strategies to accelerate the pace of positive change in managing e-records. Its objectives are to:

· investigate the issues and problems of ERM
· develop a contemporary critical view of the state of ERM globally at both the research and practical levels
· challenge existing recordkeeping paradigms to develop an appropriate practical paradigm for ERM, and
· develop and share examples of ERM strategies, tactics and practice through a series of scenario-based vignettes and this blog.

It is being conducted in phases, beginning with a comprehensive systematic literature review and followed by an investigation of three facets of designing an organisation-centred architecture for ERM i.e people, processes and technology. Using a combination of e-Delphi studies and face-to-face colloquia in the UK, professionals and academics will be engaged from multiple disciplines (e.g. information, records and archives management, humanities, business management, medicine) and different stakeholder groups (i.e. senior managers, records professionals, IT/systems administrators and recordkeepers).

The aim is to involve around 250 participants, making it a significant study. Participants will share and learn about issues, approaches, successes and failures, and this blog will provide a vital global discussion forum and data collection tool for sharing and learning throughout the entire project.

A full-time PhD student, who is exploring risk management to identify how electronic records can be better managed within the context of risk, is also a member of the project team and responsible for maintaining the blog.

Project website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/

McDonald, J. (2005). The wild frontier ten years on. In: McLeod, J and Hare, CE (Eds). Managing electronic records. Facet, p.1-17.

Julie McLeod
Project Director

Introduction to the blog

2007-03-30T14:14:00.001Z

This blog has two important roles in the research project.

The first is to disseminate the project's ideas and findings on a regular basis to the widest possible audience. Our aim is that ongoing dissemination throughout its life will emphasise the urgency of the ERM issue, engage a wide audience in discussion, influence change as the research proceeds, ensure the outputs are timely and can be used as soon as possible, and continue to encourage participation.

The blog’s second role is to collect views and encourage trans-disciplinary debate in response to postings about the project’s activities and interim findings. We will use it to collect data on designing an architecture for ERM over and above the formal planned activities. (See the post Introduction to the Project – label: ACerm project, March 2007 - on the blog). The data will be analysed and the main emergent themes will be included in the findings.

The project team will post at least one item of interest on ERM to the blog each month, along with interim project findings and requests for comments. But we also want to read your views and experiences on managing e-records particularly in relation to the three specific facets under investigation i.e. people issues, understanding work processes and systems and technologies.

Anyone can add a comment to a post. The process is very easy, just follow the simple instructions in the user guide available on the project website http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/themes/rmarea/erm/blog/

There is also a project e-mail address – eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk - if you want to contact us off blog.

Please do contribute – the success of this project relies as much on the participants as the project team.

Julie McLeod
Project Director

The wild frontier – John McDonald

2007-03-30T14:07:00.001Z

In 1995 John McDonald, then at the National Archives of Canada, wrote a visionary article on the challenges of managing documents in the unstructured electronic office environment, likening it to the ‘wild frontier’ (McDonald, 1995). A decade later he reflected on the frontier of the modern office, in the opening chapter of the first UK book on e-records management, believing it still to be ‘wild’ and saying that “while significant steps have been taken, the path out of the wild frontier remains as elusive for most organisations as it was ten years ago” (McDonald, 2005 p2).

He explores the changes that have occurred in terms of the necessary infrastructure for effective ERM – laws and policies, standards and practices, systems and people, not just technology. McDonald (2005, p.6) believes that organisations do not understand “how the office functions and how it can benefit from advanced tools and techniques for managing work processes” and the associated information and that a main inhibitor to progress is “the lack of understanding managers have of records and records management” (p.7). He suggests how we might accelerate the pace of positive change by focusing on “establishing a vision, enhancing awareness, assigning accountability, designing an architecture, and building capacity” (McDonald, 2005 p.8).

John McDonald’s vision and his concept of accelerating positive change in ERM inspired the development of this project, its nature and scope; with his generous agreement it also gave rise to its title. If you have not read his articles we highly recommend them.

Two other publications also influenced the project - McKemmish et al (2005) and the ICA workbook on managing e-records from an archival perspective (ICA, 2005), which draws on ISO 15489-1 (2001) and their earlier guide.

ICA. (2005). Electronic records: a workbook for archivists. ICA Study 16. ICA. http://www.ica.org/biblio.php?pdocid=285
ISO 15489-1 (2001). Information and documentation - records management. Part 1: General. ISO.
McDonald, J (1995). Managing records in the modern office: taming the wild frontier. Archivaria, 39 (Spring), p. 70-79.
McDonald, J. (2005). The wild frontier ten years on. In: McLeod, J and Hare, CE (Eds). Managing electronic records. Facet, p1-17.
McKemmish, S. et al. (2005). Archives: recordkeeping in society. Charles Sturt University.

Julie McLeod
Project Director

1996 Literature Review on ERM

2007-03-30T07:47:00.000Z

The first, and to date, single most comprehensive literature review on ERM was published in 1996:

Erlandsson A. Electronic records management: A literature review. ICA Studies 10. Paris, International Council on Archives, 1996, pp.144. ISBN 0-9682361-2-X. http://www.ica.org/biblio.php?pdocid=5

This review was produced by the International Council on Archives (ICA) as part of their mandate: “to undertake study and research, promote the exchange of experience and draft standards and directives concerning the creation and archival processing of electronic records”. This review was an enormously influential ‘stake in the ground’ providing an “overview of the evolution that has taken place in the concepts and strategies related to the management of electronic records from an archival perspective”. It supported other activities of the ICA, e.g. their ‘Guide for managing electronic records from an archival perspective’, by providing the contextual and strategic background.

As the commissioning body was the ICA, the review was conducted from the archival perspective, with the aim “to identify and analyze the latest thinking and theories of leading experts in the management of electronic records, and the technologies that may help in formulating strategies in this field”. It covered mainly the period 1992-1996, and because of the fast-moving, rapid-changing nature of the topic a lot of the sources covered were from the grey literature. Material analysed included academic research projects, generic case studies, policy development and applications in national archives. The majority of the literature covered work from Australia and North America, but European activities were also included, particularly from The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Russia and Bulgaria.

The review was broken down into strategic and tactical issues. The strategic section emphasised the need for a ‘new paradigm’. A new approach was needed for the definition of a record in the e-environment, and the management and archiving of e-records required a new intellectual framework. The discussion of this new paradigm was placed within the wider ‘records continuum’ debate. Additionally, the review emphasised the need for records managers and archivists to participate in the design of computerised recordkeeping systems. These debates are still active today. The tactical section covered topics such as functional requirements, appraisal, metadata, storage media and preservation, and distribution and access. Many of the ideas covered in the review underpin the design of current ERMS.

We have undertaken a brief analysis of the documents covered in the review. 48 citations were included, comprising: peer-reviewed journals (37%), reports (28%), conference proceedings (21%), listserv (16%), books (14%), websites (14%), drafts (5%), unpublished material (4%), journals (3%), course material (2%), e-journals (1%), letter (1%), official publications (1%). Most of the literature was in English, with some coverage of other European language literature (German (7%), Finish (5%), Dutch (2%), French (2%), Russian (1%)). One of the strengths of our literature review based on the systematic review approach (see the post on Systematic Literature Review Methodology, under Methodology, March 2007) will be the details provided of the review process and a comprehensive mapping of the characteristics of the literature.

Sue Childs

Systematic Literature Review Methodology

2007-03-30T07:43:00.000Z

The first year of the project will comprise a major literature review of the topic of e-records management. The last comprehensive literature review on this topic was published in 1996:

Erlandsson A. Electronic records management: A literature review. ICA Studies 10. Paris, International Council on Archives, 1996, pp.144. ISBN 0-9682361-2-X. http://www.ica.org/biblio.php?pdocid=5

Our project will be using a systematic literature review methodology to conduct the review. This is the first time that this methodology has been used in the records management field. The use of this methodology is particularly well developed in the medical field, e.g. http://www.cochrane.org/, but is also becoming more and more used in social science disciplines, e.g. http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/.

Systematic literature reviews aim for a more objective, rigorous approach to reviewing the literature. The objectivity and rigour comes from establishing elements a priori and following a standard process. The stages of a classic systematic review comprise:

1. framing the question for the review

questions should be focussed, precise and specific, and set out a priori

2. identifying relevant literature

searches should be as comprehensive as possible, covering all literature types from online databases, reference lists of selected items, recent journal issues etc, and the grey literature
selection criteria (e.g. subject coverage, study and publication type, etc.) need to be established a priori. To minimise bias, selection is done independently by different reviewers and their choices compared

3. assessing the quality of the literature

with criteria established a priori. This enables individual items of evidence to be weighted based on the rigour of the work. This information can be used for selection and/or interpretation.

4. summarising the evidence

using a data extraction form established a priori. The form is used to extract the data from the literature that will answer the review’s question(s)

5. interpreting the findings.

using analysis methods established a priori. This interpretation aims to give a meaningful and practical answer to the review’s questions(s), considering the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence.

The output of the review is a narrative report, supported by data tables, a bibliography of the selected items, and a detailed description of the review process itself. Reviews covering quantitative data might also include a meta-analysis.

Further resources on this methodology:

NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination guidance on carrying out a review http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/report4.htm

EvidenceNetwork http://www.evidencenetwork.org/

ESRC Research Methods http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods/

The nature of the topic and the disciplines we are covering in our review will require modification of this classic approach, e.g. often systematic reviews are undertaken using quantitative data, but for our review the analysis will be mostly qualitative. In future postings we will be discussing how and why we’ve adapted this methodology.

Sue and Catherine Hare

Subject categorisation of posts

2007-03-30T07:40:00.000Z

Posts made to the blog will be given one or more labels (keywords). Copies of the posts are organised under these labels on the side panel so readers can look for posts on given themes.

The labels we will be using comprise, in A/Z order:

AC⁺erm project – project management and development specific information
Approaches – e.g. lifecycle; continuum; integration; embedded
Architecture – e.g. definition of ‘architecture; infrastructure (policies, standards and practices, systems and technologies, human resources)
Business Processes – e.g. understanding of business processes; business process mapping and record keeping requirements; functional analysis; role of business classification schemes and taxonomies
ERM – covering items of broader interest and/or wider scope
Methodology – discussion of the methodologies we’re using on this project; other researchers’ methodological approaches to studying ERM
Partnerships – e.g. building partnerships for effective ERM: between stakeholder groups, transdisciplinary
Progress – e.g. transition from theory to practice; where are we with the development of ERM?; drivers, barriers and culture; change management; accelerating the pace of change; implementation of / innovation in system and service development
Risk – what are the risks? risk management related to ERM
Technology – e.g. principles of design underpinning effective RM technology and systems; impact of new technology e.g. mobile communications
Vision – e.g. philosophy; paradigms; theory; principles

Sue