Curation - the missing records skill that evidence based organisations are looking for.

We know that information is important for getting our jobs done.

We also know that there are limits on how much information people will digest before making a decision.

And also a very big difference between useful information, and information.

One of the challenges of the information age, is that it's the too much information age.

We can find general answers about the way we SHOULD answer a type of question.

But our ability to find the right information to answer a specific question is declining.

Whose responsibility is it to make sure that the person has the information they need to make that decision?

What happens though, when it gets there as a 300 page document for a 2 minute decision?

Or 10 x 30 page documents?

Pretty simple - people make the decision without the information.

They go rules of thumb, or they just go with "their gut."

Because there's too much information.

Which means that the real barrier to making evidence based decisions isn't evidence, it's the right evidence, in the right place, at the right time and right level of quality.

The way we get there, is by curating the content.

This isn't a new idea.

Public servants that I used to talk to would constantly talk about rules of thumb like "one matter per piece of correspondence," and lots of rules of thumb about the length of briefs, reporting, letters - to make sure that the information presented was the right information - ranked in order of its importance.

This has also been part of archival practice for centuries - constantly looking after the collection, improving it, making sure it can fulfill its purpose.

It's in the continuum as well - future uses of the information.

Curation is (to me) one of the missing skills of records management.

What's interesting, is that the latin root of curation is 'cura' - which just means to care.

I think that if organisations need anything in the information age, it's people who care about getting the right information to the right people at the right time and level of quality.

Without that, there's just more people making bad decisions.