AC+erm in Iceland at IRMA

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

Records Management Myths and Legends

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.

The RAIN-man Cometh

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/.

International visitors @ Northumbria University

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.....

Web 2.0 / Cloud Computing events

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

Building Bridges

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

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/