How web 2.0 tools can help with records management

Web 2.0 tools (Blogs, wikis, tagging, RSS feeds and social networking sites) have added a human dimension to the unimaginably vast expanse of the world wide web.  They mitigate the problem of information overload on the web through allowing us to use other people to filter content of interest to ourselves.

Web 2.0 tools will not help with two of the core tasks of records management: applying retention periods and access permissions to records.  The world wide web doesn’t have those problems so hasn’t evolved tools to deal with them.

But the philosophies that lie behind these tools will influence conversations in organisations, and the expectations of colleagues.

The tools will also have practical uses in records management.

• Wikis keep a record of their own development.  The final output and the process of its creation are combined in one entity.  This makes it far simpler to manage than the many separate revisions of a particular document, where organisations have the difficult task of distinguishing which of those revisions are needed as a record and which aren't.
• An exchange of comments against a blog post is more visible and manageable than an e-mail thread, which resides only in individual's in-boxes.
• Folksonomies allow colleagues to voluntarily ‘tag’ documents (or folders) with any words they find meaningful.  Colleagues can then search using each other’s tags.  This could complement a business classification by offering many different perspectives on records, and by indicating which documents and folders particular colleagues found useful
• Social network sites have parallels with collaborative sites within organisations, and can be used to provide an alternative to e-mail, particularly to internal e-mail.