The Corporate Memory: : Information Management in the Electronic Age

Citation

Duff, A.S. (1998), "The Corporate Memory: : Information Management in the Electronic Age", Library Review, Vol. 47 No. 1, pp. 58-58. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1998.47.1.58.18

The Corporate Memory is a volume in Bowker‐Saur’s Information Management series, whose goal, according to series editor Guy St Clair, is to bring home the importance of management skills for information professionals, and in particular to “enable the information worker to relate information management to organisational management”. This laudable and eminently useful aim is realised in the present contribution, although for the most part only at an elementary level.

The author’s basic premise is that developments in information and telecommunications technology are necessitating a radically new approach to the administration of an organisation’s corporate memory. Old‐ fashioned librarianship and records management no longer suffice, because the myriad new media of electronic information have cut out collection building and other practices associated with print on paper. Redundancy, Kenneth Megill tells us, has even afflicted the very concept of the document. In its place we now have “atomic entities”, much smaller units of information which can be assembled on demand in response to specific queries. It is an interesting theory which inevitably reminds us of Logical Atomism and the early Wittgenstein ‐ evidence of the author’s background in academic philosophy.

This book is not, however, a philosophical treatise. It is a practical handbook which presents criteria for the evaluation of documents (Megill keeps using the term, presumably for convenience’s sake), advises how to do an electronic inventory and to train nonspecialists to participate in the development of corporate memory, discusses what kinds of technology are available (at generic as opposed to brand level), and outlines the likely impact of advanced information retrieval capabilities, management information systems, and the Internet. There is not enough detail on some of these matters, and the tone ‐ especially in the treatment of new technology ‐ seems excessively (unphilosophically?) affirmative, but every chapter closes with a short annotated bibliography to facilitate further inquiry.

The vexed issue of professional roles is aired briefly but of course not resolved. Librarians will probably be aware that archivists are reinventing themselves as information specialists, but may be surprised to find out that the (American) Association of Records Managers and Administrators has now officially changed its name to ARMA The Organization of Information Professionals. Megill suggests that all of the information‐based occupations have something to give to information management. But what would happen if economic or political factors in a particular organisation, say a small voluntary agency, were to result in only one post being available? Who or what would fulfil the function of running the corporate memory? If it came, as it were, to an inter‐professional shootout who would survive? We are not told, but perhaps the issue will be re‐examined later in the series.