Editorial

Citation

McLeod, J. (2002), "Editorial", Records Management Journal, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/rmj.2002.28112aaa.001

Editorial

Welcome to the new style Records Management Journal, now published by Emerald. As editors we believe that the change in publisher brings great opportunities for the future development of the journal and therefore great benefits to its readers.

Alan Cameron, formerly of the Bank of Scotland, provides an opinion piece on personal liability in records management, which gives much food for thought, particularly in the context of recent events in corporate America, alleging the untimely destruction of records. Fiona Sims, Corporate Records Manager at English Heritage, shares her organisation's change to a functional approach to records appraisal. The experience, including the "business case" and corporate benefits, will be of great interest to many of you. Also in this issue are two other articles that have a link. Piers Cain provides a critical evaluation of the MoReq specification (Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records), published in the middle of last year. One of his conclusions is that MoReq has to date had insufficient visibility but hopefully his article will help to change that. MoReq includes a chapter on metadata, which provides the link to Edward Atkinson's article on metadata. The latter considers two schools of thought on the capture of metadata for managing electronic records from his perspective as a records management practitioner. He prefers one approach over the other – it will be interesting to hear if you agree or not! On a theme related to that of Alan Cameron, Ken Tombs explores the role of records and information management in supporting good decision making and hence good governance.

We hope that you enjoy the journal in its new format and would like to encourage you to approach us with your own contribution for a future issue.

Julie McLeod