Are you here for records or archival regulation?

A famous scientist in the field of cybernetics - Stafford Beer - once said that "the purpose of a system is what the system does."

What I think he was trying to get at, is that what we intend to do doesn't really matter.

We have to focus on what we ended up doing, and why we ended up there.

I think it's important to consider, because I think many of us are fooling ourselves about what our job is.

We tell people that we do records management.

What we actually do, is archival regulation.

The two are different.

It's pertinent, because I think that what a lot of us talk about doing in records, is safeguarding the public good, guaranteeing the integrity of government, improving the performance of organisations, making things findable, capturing the business of our organisations for the historical record etc. etc.

And then we look at the capture rate of records systems in many of our organisations.

With a straight face, how can we say that capturing records at the rate we do in any way leads to those objectives?

Mostly, we can't get people to use them even when we tell them that they're violating organisational policy and breaking the law.

If people are being hit with that stick, and they're civic minded people, they can't feel like we're delivering on the things that we say we are.

The clues to what's going on are in the definition of a record.

If we just define what a record is, and then go looking for them, we can see that there are many, many more systems that are capturing records (we often call them business systems).

I think it's also worth looking at what ISO would say about our practice, and reflecting on what records systems do.

When I look at most records systems now, I see a repository, and a registry.

We take thing that people have already created, and we register and store them.

It's custodial records done non-custodially.

Which means that we're nowhere when the record is created, and have absolutely no control of what it is.

We hope that by capturing and adequately describing the record, we might be able to find and use it for something later.

Which is VERY good archival practice.

Unfortunately, it leaves us failing at records management.

ISO tells us records management is that "field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of records, including the processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records"

Can we really argue that a records system that captures records after someone else has created, maintained and used them fulfils this mandate?

When I look at a business system, I see a system that delivers the "efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance" and use "of records including the processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records."

Obviously the strange placement of the quotes there is because the only thing that these systems don't do from the definition, is manage disposition.

Disposition is the thing that the archives really care about, because they run an archive, without disposition, they don't get any records.

So I have to ask.

Are we actually doing records management?

Or are we just doing archival regulation?

The reason this is a problem is simple.

We are in a crisis in records management at the moment.

We can't get it funded, we can't get people to do what we ask them to do.

If the reason that we can't do this, is because we're actually doing archival regulation - we've got an old playbook that we can go back to, to rescue the discipline - because archival regulation has only been around for about 50 years, records has been around somewhat longer.

It's worth pointing out too, that if the archives were able to enforce their regulations, they'd be out enforcing them.

They're not doing it - so I think we can safely assume that it can't be done.

Records though, was valuable before archival regulation existed.

It was something that organisations paid for, and were happy to pay for, well before someone told them "here's legislation that says you have to pay for it, and you have to do it like these people say."

It had value.

And in an age where we're creating more records every year than the planet created in its history until only a few years ago, and the things we're trying to organise are more complex than they've ever been - there is a really good argument that the world needs records now more than it ever has.

So we need people doing records.

Not archival regulation.

Why not leave the archives to figure out a model of regulation that they actually have the political juice to enforce.

Good records management that organisations understand, that delivers value, that organisations want to invest, and that recognises that a record is a record - wherever it is - has a better chance of producing good archives anyway.