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The purpose of this study is to raise awareness of the benefits and drawbacks involved in using digital technologies for business meetings, and identify key concerns. The shift from in-person to virtual meetings has multiple consequences, some of which impact recordkeeping.

Drawing on research from records management, anthropology, organizational theory and computer science, this study establishes the norms of physical meeting spaces and recordkeeping and explores how these norms are challenged as meetings become virtual.

Virtual meetings allow for collaboration to work across time and space and offer multiple affordances that do not exist in on-site meetings; however, they also involve the additional barrier of technical access and reduction in user attention. Virtual meetings also enable the creation, capture and sharing of increased contextual data, and this increased documentation challenges traditional recordkeeping models. Meeting technologies are also worryingly invasive. This study shows that concerns over privacy have been dismissed in the design of virtual meeting spaces, and therefore the authors recommend their more thorough consideration.

Meetings are a pervasive feature of organizational life whose significance has been overlooked in the recordkeeping literature. By bringing together research about in-person and virtual meetings in a novel and necessary way, the authors started to fill a gap and hope to inspire further studies.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how recordkeepers in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Iceland and Italy experienced accomplishing their tasks from home over varying lengths of time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A multilingual survey including 44 questions was designed and administered to the six countries identified above in 2022. This research was preceded by an environmental scan looking at existing studies considering archival and records management responses to the pandemic.

The impact of working from home on recordkeeping and, more generally, work performance was perceived differently by the survey respondents depending on various factors. The study also identified a number of similarities across countries, such as an increased awareness of the importance of records management shared by organizational actors. Surprisingly, the pandemic did not appear to have a great impact on the perceived quality of records management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study aiming to capture records professionals’ perceptions of their role while working from home during the pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the application of information culture analysis techniques in the workplace. The paper suggests that records managers should use ethnographic sensitivity, if they want to have a constructive dialogue with records creators and users, and effect positive change in their organisations.

Two pilot studies were conducted in university settings for the purpose of testing an information culture assessment toolkit. The university records managers who carried out the investigation approached the fieldwork ethnographically, in the sense that they were interested in the perspectives of their end users, and tried to understand their information cultures, rather than imposing their recordkeeping concepts and procedures.

Information culture analysis was of practical utility in large complex organisations, providing an insight into behaviours, motivations, and most importantly promoted reflection and dialogue among organisational actors.

The paper raises awareness of the diversity of professional skills and knowledge required by records practitioners. It emphasises that to remain relevant to their organisations, records managers have to be receptive and sensitive to cultural influences.

This paper aims to discuss the disconnection between the recognized centrality of the functional approach to records management and archives and the actual understanding of functions that scholars, practitioners, and records creators seem to have. It suggests that records professionals should consider functions not in the abstract but in the specific socio‐cultural contexts in which they are enacted.

After analyzing the main theoretical and methodological issues concerning the concept of function and the application of the functional approach, the paper reports some findings of an empirical study of function‐based records classification systems conducted by the author in four different organizations in Europe and North America.

The multiple‐case study research confirmed that the meaning of both function and classification are subject to various interpretations, that a number of non‐functional factors are involved in the creation of function‐based tools, and that records professionals find available explanations of functional methods confusing. The findings also indicate that there is a relationship between organizational cultures and the ways in which business and records processes are perceived and translated into practice.

This study provides a number of suggestions that may be used to improve the analysis of functions and business processes for any records management purposes. In particular, it discusses some of the non‐functional and cultural factors that influence the design and implementation of function‐based records classification systems. However, more empirical research is needed in order to broaden our understanding of functions in real‐world organizations.

Based on a broad selection of professional literature on the functional approach, this paper presents the original findings of an empirical study that uses qualitative methods to analyze and interpret the data collected. It is hoped that it will inspire more exploratory research of this kind in the records management area.

This chapter explores the relationship of rhetorical genre studies with archival studies, and identifies commonalities and differences between the two fields. By complementing and expanding the diplomatics approach to the analysis of the documentary reality of organizations, rhetorical genre studies provides the records disciplines with sophisticated conceptual tools that may be used to enhance understanding of how records are made, used, and transmitted in workplace contexts.

All genres are sites of continuous social, cultural, and ideological negotiations, and organizational records make no exception. By recognizing that records are culturally constructed artefacts that shape and are shaped through social interactions, and recordkeeping is an inherently ideological discursive practice, notions such as evidence and accountability take on new, more dynamic meanings. Record keepers as well as the creators and users of the records become agents who continuously engage in the production, reproduction, and transformation of the documentary reality of their organizations.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, this chapter offers an inclusive, situated, and dynamic view of organizational records that is in line with postmodern accounts of recordkeeping. The new reading of basic archival concepts and methods proposed in this chapter especially contributes to enrich the theoretical framework of records management, which has traditionally been represented as a technical discipline supporting unspecific ideas of organizational effectiveness.