Editorial

Citation

McLeod, J. (2010), "Editorial", Records Management Journal, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/rmj.2010.28130caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Records Management Journal, Volume 20, Issue 3

This is the final issue of the journal’s 20th anniversary volume and I begin with the pleasurable news that Dr Fiorella Foscarini has joined the Editorial Advisory Board. Dr Foscarini is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, Canada where she is a lecturer and researcher in archives and records management with particular interests that include organizational cultures and recordkeeping. Dr Foscarini will bring her knowledge and expertise not only as an academic but also as a practitioner to the Board. Her appointment also means that we have announced a new Board member(s) in each issue of the anniversary volume. Collectively, our new members represent four countries, which not only maintains the international profile of the RMJ but also is positive in terms of its future development and content. And it is the “future” which forms the focus of this issue.

In looking to the future the Editorial Board identified some themes for articles and invited authors to write a contribution. The intention was to give those authors an open space with free rein to interpret and describe the future in whatever way(s) they wished. Our initial list of themes was long and diverse: education and professional development, research, risk, the return on investment and impact of managing records, technology, digital preservation, the future of journals and publishing in the e-world and our “sister” information professions (knowledge and information management, information systems and IT. We have covered some of these and the authors are both individuals from our own discipline as well as from outside; one article is a new collaboration.

James Lappin opens with an opinion piece on what the future might be in five years time. James takes full advantage of the Board’s offer of an open space and free rein and explores what the records management orthodoxy will be in the next five years. Against the backdrop of what he terms the EDRMS model of the late 1990s and first part of the twenty-first century, the influence of DIRKS and of records continuum thinking, and the more recent meteoric rise in interest in SharePoint, James examines the “records repository” model as a potential future orthodoxy. This model, which uses a business classification scheme in a back office repository to govern the content in an organisation’s other information systems/applications, is not without its challenges, particularly in the way folders would be conceived and handled. He asks what is the role of national archives and the DLM Forum, currently embarking on an ambitious task of developing MoReq2010 to replace MoReq2[1], in developing such a new orthodoxy as well as the role of practitioners. His challenging, and disturbing, conclusion is that without a “feasible” model(s) our profession has no future. I hope this view prompts debate and action, not only by those parties explicitly identified by James, but by others too, notably academia.

Kate Cumming and Cassie Findlay consider whether or not we have reached a tipping point with digital recordkeeping. Inspired by Gladwell’s (2000) fascinating book on the tipping point concept they examine if records managers should be concerned or if they should be confident that their current practices will serve them well in the digital future, and if there are any small but significant steps that would improve digital recordkeeping, to effectively tip it in a positive way for short and long term business benefit. Drawing on their knowledge and experience in the government of New South Wales, Australia they look at that context as well as beyond, which means their conclusions will resonate more widely. With Gladwell’s book still a choice on many airports and railway station bookstands it hardly seems a decade since it was first published.

One potentially significant step, albeit not a small one, that could be taken is the subject of Jay Vidyarthi and Steve Bailey’s article. Inspired by Jay’s presentation at the European Conference on Digital Archiving in Geneva in Spring this year (Vidyarthi, 2010) and the links with elements of his own presentation, Steve approached Jay to write a collaborative piece. Together they explore the potential of human-computer interaction (HCI) as a route to solving the problem of records management successfully serving the demands of its two masters – the organization and the users. Can the records management profession “tap into” the extensive knowledge and expertise of HCI specialists to design systems that can be easily understood, liked and therefore used and, ergo, meet the demands of both masters? They highlight what might appear an immediate discord: HCI as a methodology for designing “bespoke” technological solutions and records management systems design adopting a philosophy of standardization. But they believe there is synergy and that the synergy can be used to very positive effect, which they demonstrate with a hypothetical example. What I find particularly interesting are the points made in the conclusion about user behaviour – a topic close to the hearts of many of my university colleagues and about which there is vast knowledge and experience in another related discipline – library management.

Whilst the other articles in this issue examine changes outside our discipline that will have an impact on our professional practice, the final article by Professor David Nicholas looks at the future of scholarly and professional journals such as the Records Management Journal. This might seem an unusual topic, and is certainly one that we have not covered previously, but it is one that the Editorial Board was keen to cover in this volume. Based on his vast experience in publishing, and in particular his CIBER[2] research work, we invited Professor Nicholas to answer a series of questions about the impact of the digital transition on the use of journals, such as the RMJ, and their future survival. Drawing on the evidence collected from the CIBER research his conclusions are very positive. So we should be able to look forward to the RMJ and other information management journals continuing to provide a valuable channel for sharing views, good practice and research and development in the future.

The subject matter of the resource reviews in this issue reflects fundamental elements of our discipline, namely retention scheduling and legal requirements, as well as those that are trans-disciplinary and have become increasingly important tools for records professionals, namely risk management. The reviewers have brought their own perspective to their review with an eye to the potential wider interested audiences.

Every issue of a journal is special since its content and combination of contributors are unique. But in many ways an anniversary issue is particularly special. Significant anniversaries are, by their very nature, rare. Only some of the current Board members are likely to be involved in the 40th anniversary volume though I hope many will be involved in the 30th anniversary one. Reflecting on the process of compiling the 20th anniversary volume brings to mind many, very positive points.

It began with my initial discussions with the RMJ’s excellent publishing team at Emerald – Lizzie Scott and Sarah Baxter – from which ideas for themed issues and associated publicity emerged. These were refined and developed in discussion with the Editorial Board and emerged as the themes we have published: a “retrospective” of the development of the journal and the profession; a “state-of-the nation” in terms of record keeping in the broader context and global themes; and this “future watch”. Whilst we have not covered all of the topics we identified or secured all of the contributors we approached, we have included topics we had not anticipated and authors who were not known or well-known to some of us. The result is, I hope, an anniversary volume that all of those associated with the production of the Records Management Journal can be proud of and one which its readers find valuable. One of our other ‘anniversary’ intentions was to identify articles that could be précised for Emerald Management First[3], the Emerald corporate platform targeting the management audience. This is particularly important for records and information management and the Editorial Advisory Board will shortly select which articles would be most relevant for this.

I feel extremely fortunate to have been the “resident” Editor of the RMJ in its 20th anniversary year and would like to thank everyone who has helped bring together this very special volume and make it what it is.

I will close with some of my own thoughts on the future inspired this time by a piece in Information Age about Marchandani’s (2010) book The New Polymath. Not yet in possession of a copy at the time of writing, my thoughts are based on the content of the article and the publicity on the book’s web site. The article quotes Marchandani as saying the new polymath is “an enterprise that is becoming comfortable with the whole spectrum of information technology and beyond, looking at biotech, nanotech, cleantech and healthtech” and the web site lists the “building blocks” such an enterprise would use as “next-generation analytics, cloud computing, sustainability, disruptive economics and others” (Information Age, 2010, p. 30). What struck me was that these are things that information and records managers are either already using, involved with or are currently exploring. The article further quotes Marchandani as saying “[d]uring the Renaissance, people were encouraged to be good at many things. Today, that’s a dying breed. Even in business we encourage people to be very siloed.” It highlights that, in the twenty-first century, many chief information officers began to report to chief financial officers and began dancing to the “compliance and control” tune (my words). I would say that Freedom of Information legislation reinforced this. Referring to IT executives rather than information and records executives, “Marchandani argues that innovating while serving the “compliance and control” agenda is beyond even the most polymathic” ones. Some would argue records professionals have always been polymaths, certainly multi-skilled with a wide breadth of knowledge; but this article made me reflect that in the future will it be even more important to be the new polymath professional rather than the specialist? Certainly we need to rise to Marchandani’s challenge to “think bigger, because technology is allowing us to do much bigger things than we could before.”

Julie McLeod

Notes

1. DLM Forum, www.dlmforum.eu/2. CIBER, www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/3. Emerald Management First, http://first.emeraldinsight.com