Developing a Records Management Programme

Citation

Hare, C. and McLeod, J. (1998), "Developing a Records Management Programme", Librarian Career Development, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 154-155. https://doi.org/10.1108/lcd.1998.6.1.154.1

A short, practical guide to records management ‐ what a good idea! It’s surprising that no one had thought of it before.

Dear reader, they had. “They” being the royal commission on historical manuscripts whose advisory memorandum No. 5 records management. Advice to smaller organizations wishing to introduce a records management system, published in 1993, can be yours for the price of a sheet of writing paper, an envelope and a postage stamp. Get it, read it before investing in any other guide to RM.

Mesdames Hare and McLeod, who on the evidence of this book appear to be unaware of the HMC’s existence, have, by contrast, laid a real curate’s egg in the guise of this new Aslib Know How Guide.

Where it is good, it is very good. Its core chapters, 3‐5 and dealing with the “records management programme”, “the records audit” and “the retention schedule”, are clear, straightforward and less obviously choked with the surfeit of citations that give this book overall a rather stale, second‐hand character. These sections, taken in conjunction with the HMC guide referred to above will give the new‐comer to records management a good solid grounding in the principles and practice applicable, whatever the scale of the task.

I advise you to turn to these sections first, pausing only to look at the final paragraph of p. 10 ‐ a neat summing up of the context of records management which would have made a fine opening to the book. To begin at the beginning will have you yawning, for chapters one and two are, frankly, bloated and rambling.

The later chapters are overdone and repetitive and should have been severely edited, but that would have left the finished product somewhat anorexic, I suppose. Chapter six gives us the usual line on selling RM to senior management. Get real, please. Chapter seven, on training, will rapidly become dated and is over‐extended for a guide of this sort. And while on the subject of built‐in obsolescence, is there much point in publishing in the appendix the names of list servers “the continued existence” of which “cannot be guaranteed”? Chapter eight consists of a single page of platitudes ‐ most, if not all, of which are to be found elsewhere in the book ‐ headed The challenge of change. Pretentious, nous?

The niggle about list servers excepted, the appendix is full of nourishing fare: lists of professional associations and journals, key standards and a glossary. There is, unforgiveably, no index.

This might have been a model of a Know How Guide. Pity they couldn’t afford the ha’p’orth of tar.