How search changed fundamental relationships in records without changing practice.

25 years ago, the difference between an organisation with good records management and an organisation with no records management could be expressed in one relationship.

This was the relationship between how long it took you to find something, and the volume of paper you had.

This is because finding things on paper is fundamentally different.

If you have a random set of paper records and you need to find specific information in them, you have to read from one end to the other.

It should be noted that while this example seems extreme and unlikely to occur, I do know lots of organisations that are going to be faced with that in the future. They may be reading box or file titles and trying to work out whether something is in them - but they're still starting at the beginning, and reading through to the end with very little ability to cull the sample size before they start reading.

Then we got search.

Search fundamentally changes these relationships.

Now there's no relationship between volume and findability.

The relationship is now between the term you want to search for, and how often it appears in your content.

The interesting thing to me, is that this relationship is fundamental in findability, and findability has been the core of records management forever.

So why didn't we see huge changes in practice when one of the fundamental relationships in our profession changed?