The UK's first professor of records management

I went to Northumbria University last week, to see Julie McLeod's inaugural lecture as the UK's first professor of records management.

Julie is project director of a major 3 year research project Accelerating positive change in electronic records management (ERM).  The project is an attempt to find out why progress towards ERM has been so slow, and to develop an architecture for ERM that is based on the ways that people work in organisations.  The project has a very good blog.

A crowd of around 50 people had travelled to Newcastle from all over the UK to hear the lectrue, including records managers, fellow academics, former students and Julie's family. The size of the turn out is testimony to the regard and affection in which the profession holds Julie.

Julie gave an engaging overview of the history of records management and the challenges it faces in today's world.   Shining through the talk was a sense that records management will have to change radically, but will still be very much needed.

Julie talked us through the requirement of the International Records Management Standard that records should be authentic, reliable, usable, complete, and unaltered.  She then contrasted this requirement with three great quotes about the fragile nature of modern digital information:

• 'digital information lasts forever... or five minutes whichever comes first' (title of a 2001 talk on digital preservation by Jeff Rothenberg

• 'The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital' Quote from an article in Wired Magazine by sci-fi novelist William Gibson.  Gibson notes that in literature, film and music nothing is ever started from scatch, and nothing is ever finished, instead things are cut and pasted, sampled, altered, re-combined and re-purposed.  This reminds me of the underuse of the facility in ERM systems to declare a document as a record, thus preventing it from being further edited or altered (though the text can be re-used in a new document).  It is one of the hardest features of ERM to explain to colleagues and is frequently ignored by them: perhaps because it cuts against the spirit of our times.

• 'The liquid version':  this concept comes from a thought provoking article on the future of the book by Kevin Kelly in the New York Times. Kelly thinks that books of the future will no longer stand alone, between two covers, telling a complete story from beginning to end.  Instead they will be drops in the liquid ocean of the world wide web.  Books will be annotated by their readers to link them into the rest of the world's knowledge.  Instead of reading whole books people will pick parts of them, much like i-tunes listeners select from the track-lists of albums.  In records management I often think of a good file as being like a good book: it tells the whole story of a piece of work.  If books were to dissolve would records dissolve too?

James Lappin