Happy birthday to RMJ

Citation

Morddel, A. (2010), "Happy birthday to RMJ", Records Management Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/rmj.2010.28120aaa.002

Happy birthday to RMJ

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Records Management Journal, Volume 20, Issue 1

In 1988 I was contacted by ASLIB about a project to start a records management publication in the UK. At that time, I had recently published, with others, The Records Management Handbook (which many consider to be the definitive text on the subject), and I also was writing a regular column in the ARMA Records Management Quarterly. The Records Management Society had formed only a few years earlier, in 1983, and I was fortunate to have been the first Secretary of the Society, and one of the early editors of its newsletter. ASLIB told me they were hoping to create a publication that would be more British, European and international than the narrowly focused ARMA Records Management Quarterly, which was the only significant journal at the time. They gave me, essentially, a carte blanche.

At the time, the profession was quite new in the UK, and even in North America not really as old as it liked to pretend. It was still struggling for recognition – every professional meeting and every course involved a component on how to get senior management to know that a records management programme was necessary.

One also could observe the struggles of the profession to clarify its purpose. Was it a service? Was it a control mechanism? Was it an aspect of organisational housekeeping? Was it a form of time management?

Early meetings of the Records Management Society were quite vocal as members struggled with the profession’s identity, with lines drawn between the public and private sectors, and with confusion added by certain professional foreign aid workers who saw records management as a new gravy train.

With Records Management Journal (RMJ), I was hoping to address this lack of clarity and to bring new ideas, always keeping a focus on the practical. From my experience as both a corporate records manager, and later as a consultant in records and information management, I had observed that the field was nothing if not practical and that an over-emphasis on theoretical articles would lead to a publication that would bring no guidance or advice to those in the profession struggling to achieve the results by which their work and the profession would be judged.

The editorial team was small, and consisted of myself, Veronica Davies, the senior knowledge management consultant for Royal Dutch Shell – who had substantial international experience and a most superior intellect – and Ralph Cornes, who was writing superb articles for the “Computer Guardian” and who had a very clear understanding of the field. Together, we reviewed, edited and approved the content of RMJ.

My goal for RMJ was to create something comprehensive, looking at all aspects of records management: retrieval systems, cultural consequences of increasing access to personal information and to an ever increasing ability to manipulate it, privacy law, international approaches, how it grew from and may or may not still be related to libraries and archives, its struggling identity, etc.

During my years as Editor, I strove to find contributors who had experience with the realities of the profession. Though contributors from Nigeria or Uganda or Japan might have described situations quite different from those in the UK, I felt that the central intellectual issue of records management – the struggle to have a comprehensive and functional organisation of disparate collections of recorded data and ideas to be used for various purposes – remained the same for all, and that every experience described could provide lessons to any willing to learn. It was an exciting endeavour to be working with such fine minds in an effort to create something of lasting interest and utility.

At the end of three years, it was with some regret that I resigned my editorship for personal reasons: I relocated to Istanbul. ASLIB were experiencing some organisational and financial difficulties and decided to put RMJ on hold. It was a pleasure to see that it was only a brief retirement and that Records Management Journal has now grown to such distinction. Congratulations to the current Editor and her team for its success and its twentieth year!

About the author

Anne Morddel has worked in children’s literature and as a children’s librarian, usually in bilingual schools, for over 25 years. For a dozen years during that time, she maintained a highly successful parallel career in records and information management. A native of Northern California, she has lived and worked in London, Kampala, Istanbul, Curitiba, and São Paulo. She now lives in Paris and travels frequently to London. Anne Morddel can be contacted at: info@morddeleditions.com

Anne MorddelFormer Editor, Records Management Journal, Paris, France