Spotlight

Having only been in post for two weeks I was whisked off to sunny Brighton. And from Sunday 19th to Tuesday 21st of April Brighton was indeed sunny, not least because it was the venue for the Records Management Society Annual Conference 2009. Titled ‘Back to the Future’, I thought the conference would be a good opportunity to see where the profession saw itself and where it was heading. The conference was a great success, providing a novice of Records Management (RM) like myself with an insight into the profession. I wasn’t disappointed as the conference gave me an appreciation of the day to day, the future and the breadth of RM.

An animated case study was delivered by Wiltshire County Council (as was) regarding ‘gaining user buy-in’ and ‘reaping what you sow’. This session caught my eye as the project that I am working on with JISC infoNet is about measuring the benefits to records management, so I was intrigued to know how the council set about their harvest, so to speak. Unfortunately only a taster of the measures were covered in the session, but when approached the people from Wiltshire were more than happy to share the detail out of conference. Interestingly the facilitator for ‘user buy-in’ had a marketing and communications background, was the concept of records management given the hard sell? Either way Wiltshire is enjoying the benefits of the change of culture, as it moves on to its next challenge of merging with 4 other district councils to become a unitary authority.

Wiltshire was also a case study in a later session around Records Management and the merging or dividing of organisations. The second case study of this session, by the Northern Ireland Office, provided a great insight into the assistance RM can give to support the significant organisational change affecting people, processes and technology when establishing a new government department. This case study provided a very tangible application of RM and illustrated to me the benefits of metadata, a term I am only just coming to grips with. The presenter of this session very much saw people at the heart of an organisation and referred to the support that must be shown to them during a change in organisational structure, a sentiment I very much echo, and illustrated how RM could assist this.

A confusion of terminology meant that I happened upon ‘Electronic Discovery and Records Management’, rather than the expected ‘Electronic Documents and Records Management’, but a session which gave food for thought none the less. The presentation centred around being able to retrieve information from structured database systems. Familiar territory to me I thought, as I am used to working with large student record databases. The perspective of the session was one of being able to scope, acquire and analyse relevant data in the case of a dispute or investigation. The session highlighted that the ‘black box’ or operational database should be fully documented and accessible, especially those that had been superseded and were no longer in active use. From an initial impression that structured data is easy and takes care of itself, the session left me thinking that in the here and now this may be the case, but historically the ‘black box’ could prove problematic.

In a similar vein a later session gave a brief introduction to Digital Forensics and went on to discuss similarities in the development of this field to that of RM. The speaker talked of the growing need for clear communication between Records Managers, IT and Legal Departments and the language barriers that may exist between these groups. The speaker suggested that the new field of Information Assurance and its growing terminology may provide a common language and Records Managers with an opportunity to be involved in the right meetings, at the right time, and be part of the discussions regarding an organisation’s infrastructure. An interesting session, not least because of the strategies illustrated to support communication between professions.

I found the event very informative and entertaining, but with this new outlook on Records Management the question of how do we ‘Create a common research framework for measuring the impact of records management’ only seems to grow.