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Archivists, records managers, and librarians need to manipulate large amounts of data every day. Many people believe that this requires specially designed, complicated and expensive software. However, depending on your setting, the specifics of what you want to do and how comfortable you feel with computers, many information processing tasks can be automated with the use of ordinary, simple and inexpensive software. In most cases, all that an information professional would need is a good word processor and a piece of decent database management software. In addition, if the amount of data to be handled is large, then a powerful computer would help to speed things up. This paper describes how this was achieved in one setting: the Archives Museum of the Yapi Kredi Bank in Turkey.

The purpose of this paper is to point out the increasing need to provide information professionals with a sound grounding in the technological aspects of their profession.

The paper sets out by describing the sudden increase in volumes of information that confront our society, and then looks at how the younger generation approaches/uses this mass of information. It then analyses how the traditional functions of information professionals (presentation of material, reliable preservation of information, maintaining authenticity, and conservation) are handled in an electronic environment.

The paper discovers that considerable technical knowledge and experience are required to carry out those same functions in an electronic environment and suggests a redefinition of information sciences as information engineering.

The paper recommends increasing the technology content in the training of information professionals such as archivists, records managers and librarians.

The paper concludes with a radical assertion that the proper locus for such training is a school of engineering rather than a school of librarianship, information studies and/or archives.

This paper aims to advocate that significant human and systems-based capabilities (termed “socio-technical capabilities”) need to be developed in government departments and other public sector organisations to support more effective description of information resources, collections and their context in online environments.

The ideas in this paper draw upon the findings of several action research interventions undertaken within a government department in Victoria in Australia since 2011 as part of a knowledge management initiative. Specific focus is given to the design and development of a new record-centric knowledge curation tool (KCT).

Effective functioning of KCT relies upon the input of well-structured, standards-based metadata used to describe collections, information resources and their context. The central claim is that the move towards standards-based descriptions will fundamentally change the capabilities required to manage, search for and disseminate knowledge and records.

In addition to the capabilities discussed, management of records and knowledge through time requires commitments to stable repository, workflow and administrative systems, and working with contemporary systems involves technical knowledge such as the use of application programming interfaces. These aspects are not discussed here.

The capabilities discussed in this paper are socio-technical in nature. This means there is a requirement to shift current perspectives about who is responsible for managing organisational information as collections.

While some of the concepts discussed will be familiar to information professionals, the paper provides a unique description of how existing archival and recordkeeping practices are being integrated in innovative ways within organisations outside the information management professions.