Managing Records: A Handbook of Principles and Practice

Citation

Newton, C. (2003), "Managing Records: A Handbook of Principles and Practice", Records Management Journal, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 102-103. https://doi.org/10.1108/09565690310485324

This work bids fair to be considered the first major UK contribution to the literature of records management. It is an elegant, meticulous and wide‐ranging presentation of the techniques and theories of the discipline. The first section attempts definitions of every relevant term, including records management itself, for which the wording of ISO 15489 is used, and archives defined as “any records that are recognised as having long‐term value”. While this might not satisfy the purists, the authors go on to discuss provenance and original order, which are concepts rarely found heretofore in textbooks of records management. The next section “Analysing the context for records management”, is mainly concerned with business analysis and organisational theory, for which Charles Handy has been called on as a source. A discussion of the techniques of records survey, classification by function and process, and the issues around the creation and capture of records into a controlled system environment follow. The authors move on to the more traditional issues – appraisal and retention decisions, physical storage and protection. Records centres are dealt with (slightly eccentrically perhaps) under the title “Maintaining records and assuring their integrity”. The final sections deal with access and what are called “Practical and managerial issues”. This tends to be repetitious of parts of the opening sections and to include matter such as employing consultants and proforma job descriptions. Throughout the book there is no flinching from the issues raised by electronic record‐keeping and controlling systems. There is an excellent bibliography but unfortunately no critical exegesis has been applied. References to Leahy and Cameron, and Benedon, show appropriate piety to the founders of the faith but the works of both are nearly 40 years old and are conditioned by hard copy filing systems.

The work is of such significance that it must be paid the compliment of detailed examination and criticism. It is well presented, very well written and reasonably priced. It eschews the jargon, waffle, and business‐speak employed too often in this kind of work. Indeed the short, balanced sentences – subject, verb and object, each adding to the argument or giving positive information, would have been a joy to Macaulay or A.J.P. Taylor. Data are always plural in this book. We even get a reference to the gerund. Unfortunately there is a drawback. As when viewing the endless classical façades of Bath one longs for the occasional Gothic fantasy, the effect of perfect sentence piled on perfect sentence can be numbing. This is not made easier by the authors’ almost preternatural desire to balance all their statements with the opposite point of view. There is much use of “may”, “might” and “could”, very little of “ought”, and “must”. There is an obsession with metadata, a term which sometimes turns out to be used, inaccurately, to mean a card index or a transmittal list. Diagrams are used (though occasionally in irritatingly small print) but practical examples are conspicuous by their almost complete absence. This leads to one of the major criticisms.

In their preface the authors state their aim as being to address both those who know nothing of the subject and equally experienced practitioners. This is a dangerously wide target audience. As a textbook for students on a records course the work is highly commendable, but it is hard to see how anyone faced with a practical working problem to solve would be able to make much use of it. Even IT systems are discussed in general terms rather than in the context of specific commercial applications and there is no easy way to access all relevant material on a topic. The refusal to come down in a positive manner on many issues also leaves the enquirer seeking hard advice not much more enlightened. The book does not tell me how to develop a basic system of good practice and migrate it through increasing degrees of sophistication. Its heavily theoretical approach implies all or nothing. The authors have achieved their own particular Parnassus and should be acclaimed for it, but most records managers would benefit more from help in draining their swamp.

As in all works of this kind some matters of detail may be questioned. The statement on p. 13 that blank forms are not records may raise the eyebrows of archivists. I know what the authors mean but they have failed for once to make it clear. There is an interesting discussion of the relation of documents and records but it seems to miss the essential point that a document is a physical entity and a record a conceptual entity. Nor do they have intrinsic qualities. A.P. Herbert made a cow into a document. The section on organisational theory (pp. 41‐8) seems overlong and is not clearly linked to record issues. Most records managers know in which type of organisation they are placed without need to refer to Charles Handy. Moreover, there are cases in which the best records strategy is counter‐cultural. There is a failure to differentiate clearly between classification and reference in the section on classification. A discussion of whether clerical staff need five trays on their desk (p. 118) indicates that some practical sense might have helped, and the description of filing processes (pp. 133ff) seems a little orotund. Few places today, even in the public sector, have teams of filing staff busily collecting files, adding documents and registering new ones. Archives are re‐defined as “indefinitely retained records” on p. 183, a terminology which must be a red rag to any competent records manager. In dealing with conversion (p. 174) a recommendation that poor quality originals should be retained is good sense, but then why convert them in the first place? The discussion of thesauri (pp. 234ff) is excellent in theory but fails to relate their use to the real world in which the intellectual effort required has to bear some reasonable relationship to the benefits.

There is much of value in the book sometimes on issues which get little if any coverage in records management literature, e.g. cryptography, thesauri, workflow, provenance. It seems churlish therefore to ask why other issues are largely ignored. Copyright, freedom of information, data management, “grey” literature, project management, are mentioned either only briefly or not at all. But perhaps the biggest question raised by the book is of wider significance. What is the essence of records management? Is it a profession in its own right with a unique set of techniques, principles, and rules? Despite the title, reading Shepherd and Yeo, the uninitiated could assume that adding together some archives knowledge, librarianship, IT skills, and a dash of legal learning is the formula for a records manager. The detailed clerical procedures set out in places here tend to strengthen the impression that management is a minor part of the discipline. We are given a very meticulous and elegant Hamlet, but few clues to the existence of a Prince of Denmark.