If someone ever said to you, ‘Congratulations, you're now our Records Manager. Good luck with the new job. We have every confidence you'll grow into it – but don't come to see me unless it's really important’, this book would help you, probably more than any other.
Jointly and easily written by ALJ contributor Gillian Oliver from the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington and Fiorella Foscarini, an archivist in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, the text is full of examples of different and thoughtful approaches to safekeeping organisational memory.
Intended for practitioners and academics alike, the authors' objective is
… to provide new perspectives and a set of practical tools to assist organizational records specialists in their complex task of managing the written outcomes and means of people's activities.
These new perspectives are explained in the context of an Information Culture Framework which makes explicit the value assigned to records, discusses information preferences, language and technological infrastructure, then considers the knowledge, skills and expertise of staff, including digital literacy, training and legislative requirements. The final section addresses unique organisational characteristics such as corporate IT governance and architecture, as well as management and employee trust in existing systems.
The outcome is a convincing assault on RM's perennial (people) problem: buy-in from record creators and custodians.
We strongly believe that each records management situation involves specific, multifaceted problems that resist any univocal identification, and it therefore requires in-depth, situated analyses, where nothing should be taken for granted.
Once you read the book, you will too. Presented in nine chapters, each with an opening overview and concluding summary, notes and references, the material is international in scope, with an Australian and New Zealand slant, and right up to date with consideration of soft system methodology, genre studies and cloud computing, and some references as recent as 2013.
And to round it out, the index is one of the best this reviewer has seen. Comprehensive, precise and in-context (13 references to DIRKS – State Records' NSW Design and Implementation of Recordkeeping Systems, and 20 to ISO15489 – the international standard for records and records management), it gives the book a dual role as a reference source.
Human factors in recordkeeping – the elephant in the room. This is the book that was waiting to be written. Thanks to Oliver and Foscarini, we no longer have to wait to read it. It comes highly recommended.