Conference

Citation

Hardiman, R. (2006), "Conference", Records Management Journal, Vol. 16 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/rmj.2006.28116cae.001

Conference

Exploring the Essence of Records Management – A Witness Seminar Conference, Newcastle upon Tyne, 4-5 May 2006

Keywords: Records management, Witnesses

St James Park, the home of Newcastle United, played host to a fascinating exploration and exchange of ideas in a conference organised by Northumbria University’s School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences. The conference was presented as a “witness seminar”, a variant of oral history developed by the Centre for Contemporary British History and the Wellcome Trust, whereby pivotal figures (the “witnesses”) engage in a discussion of a topic or topics in their field, which is transcribed and later published. The conference organisers adapted this form by focussing not on the historical, but on significant present and future issues impacting on records management.

For those delegates (including this reviewer) who are gamely working through Northumbria’s MSc in Records Management, the names of the seminar chairs and the contributing witnesses formed a roll-call of the required authors from our reading-lists, with a leaven of sympathetic experts from outside that world to inject new perspectives into the discussions. A rich diversity of recordkeeping traditions was a further active ingredient – strands from mainland Europe, North America and Australia all had their representatives. The conference was introduced by Professor Alistair Sambell and Dr Julie McLeod of Northumbria University. Each of the three seminars had as its starting-point a chosen published article, read in advance by both the witnesses and the conference participants:

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  Seminar 1, “Embedding records management into business processes” was launched by Chris Hurley’s “What, if anything, is records management?” (www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/rcrg/publications/ch-what.pdf). The chair was Michael Moss and the witnesses Steve Bailey, Peter Horsman, Gary Johnston, Barbara Reed, David Wainwright and Vicki Wilkinson.

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  Seminar 2, “Is records management the management of risk?” took off from Willis’ (2005)“Corporate governance and management of information and records”. Chairing this was Ceri Hughes, with witnesses James Currall, Michael Dunleavy, Alastair Irons, Vicki Lemieux and Victoria Vallely.

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  Seminar 3, “Who are the records managers?” had as its point of departure the editorial essay “Catalyst or cataclysm (Information Management Journal, 2004). The chair was Stuart Orr and the witnesses Max Beekhuis, Clare Cowling, Ian McEwen, Peter McKinney, Frank Rankin and Frank Upward.

The format of the event and the range and depth of experience brought by the witnesses made good the promise of the conference title to “explore the essence of records management”. In the exploratory spirit of the conference, the following account attempts to give a synoptic – even impressionistic – view rather than a sequential account of proceedings in which invocations of Derrida and Foucault switched fluidly to the nuts and bolts of a records manager’s day at the office, and back again.

A handful of themes were persistent, surfacing in one way or another in each seminar and discussion – relations and conflicts between recordkeeping and an exponentially developing information communication technology (ICT) environment (and its corollary, “turf wars” between records managers and their information technology (IT) colleagues for the ear of senior management); the relation between records management and business needs and processes; the struggle to maintain order in the centrifugal and anarchic information world created by the failure to find a contemporary equivalent for abandoned traditional registry practices; the ontological status of records management as a discipline and, concomitantly, what exactly it is that records managers can offer that no-one else can.

The ICT revolution was seen in a decidedly mixed light, the fragmented nature of systems and the desktop culture leading to a dis-embedding of records management from business processes. While records managers loitered frustratedly in the corporate vestibule, their IT colleagues seemed to knock on an open door. Were EDRMs a soon-to-be obsolescent straitjacket or a solution to poor electronic recordkeeping practice? On a more philosophical level, was the technology of business processes – increasingly evolving away from the technology of records management – leading towards a sort of new orality? A more robust view was that we had only ourselves to blame, hiding behind filing and storage at the vital juncture when we should have been confidently staking a claim in the brave new world. And a final provocative thought: maybe senior management had been listening to us all along, but simply decided that what we had to offer in terms of business goals was not as useful as IT.

The filleting of bureaucratic structures that took place from the 1980s onwards threw the baby of bureaucratic discipline – at the core of traditional recordkeeping – out with the bathwater of rigid and unresponsive organisation. Everything in the information environment is now, on a pessimistic reading, “in a state of disintegration and fragmentation.” Is this a lack felt by users? The assertion that users “don’t give a fig” stood in counterposition to anecdotes of an almost desperate need among users for guidance to close the yawning gap between their “ownership” of records and their inability to create or maintain them systematically. Records managers no longer manage records on a day-to-day basis – that is actually done, and generally done badly, by the end-user. To reintegrate good recordkeeping into an organisation’s activities and functions, the users need to be integrated fully into a recordkeeping role, leaving the records managers to involve themselves primarily with organisational policy and influencing their environment. Left unanswered was the gently destabilising question: “do senior managers believe their organisations are in chaos? And if not, why not?”

What, if anything, is records management? A definitive answer to Chris Hurley’s question remained as elusive as ever. From one point of view, records managers’ strength will lie in being confident in who they are and what they do. From another, they cannot even be sure that their field is a separate discipline rather than just a part of an evolving subject area. Does the core of records management lie in appraisal? Or the ability to contextualise information? Or in compliance and the management of risk? Risk in this context is not a simple matter, however, and not merely because of the danger of association with a purely negative aspect of business, or of becoming a “one-trick pony”. Risk itself is a context-dependent “socio-technical construct”. And risk management is not equivalent to risk minimisation; risk takes a business forward as well as back and opens up exciting new possibilities. Records management therefore needs to ally itself with a business’ strategic aims – which include risks – rather than with an audit function. For the cynical, the best hope lies in one witness’s assertion that “recordkeeping is a mark of distrust in society”. Records management must surely have a long and distinguished future ahead of it!

“Practice without theory is blind. Theory without practice is sterile” (Engels, 1886). At this conference, the judicious interchange of theory and practice brought vision and fruitfulness. It stands as a testament to the organisers and witnesses that it is probably the only professional gathering ever held where the universal verdict was that it had ended far too soon.

Rachel HardimanRoyal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, London, UK