When office IT networks came in during the 1990's records managers and archivists speculated on whether we could ever reproduce the paper file in electronic form.
The key features of the traditional paper file were that it:
- told the whole story of a piece of work
- was kept in an organised filing system together with files from similar pieces of work
- was visually distinct from any collection of papers that people had gathered for their own convenience but which was not regarded as an official file
These factors can be replicated on an electronic system. What can not be replicated is the authority and importance the paper file had for the people carrying out a piece of work.
I can go to the National Archives today and order a thirty year old file about a particular project. They will hand me a file that would have been used as a working tool by the people who carried out that project. It would have been taken along to important meetings. It would have been the first place anyone would have looked if they had wanted to know or check something about that project.
The file would have been a staple part of the conversations of people working on the project. You would have heard people say things like:
Nowadays you are more likely to hear:
- 'can you put that in an e-mail'
- 'can you copy me into that e-mail?'
- 'can you forward me the e-mail so-and-so sent?'
For the immediate actors involved in the thick of a piece of work, e-mail has taken over from the file/electronic folder as their prime source of information and authority, as their working tool.
When you look at the piece of work from a distance, either of time or of space, e-mail is far less useful than a file/electronic folder. Other colleagues cannot access the e-mail in-boxes of the people involved in the project. Even the people involved in the project would struggle to piece together the project from their e-mail after a distance of three or six months.
Teams do generally keep an electronic folder for a piece of work, whether in a shared drive or in a collaborative system or a records management system environment. But will historians be interested in these electronic folders when they look back on our era? They seem something of an afterthought, drained of the life and energy that actually went into the project. They will be cluttered with many versions of the same document (ten versions of a particular draft of a presentation/proposal/report/). They will be missing significant documents or e-mails. The reduced importance of the folder in the working life of the project as compared to twenty years ago, means that these inadequacies are less likely to be picked up by the people working on the project, and less likely to be of concern to them.
The challenge (and opportunity!) for us as information professionals is that:
- organisations face massive problems with e-mail: important information being shuttled between e-mail in-boxes that effectively constitute a massive collection of individual, inaccessible, unmanageable, information silos
- organisations still need the team of people carrying out a project to leave behind them a usable narrative of their work, which integrates the key documents of the project into a coherent story
Is it possible to create working spaces where the thread of messages between people about that work is kept in a shared space, together with the documents relating to that work? A working social space that combines the features of a record folder, a SharePoint collaborative project site and a social networking site/blog/wiki. A place where colleagues can message colleagues, leaving a trace on the site (with alerts going to e-mail in-boxes).
The National Archives produced a specification for electronic systems that work from a technical recordkeeping point of view. What would a specification look like for a working environment that works from a social point of view as well as a recordkeeping point of view, and which could again enable the working tool of a project team to be the trace left for others looking at the project from a distance of time or space?
