Making records something that organisations want to buy, independent of legislation.

Here’s the most puzzling thing about records to me.

Records exists in organisations now almost entirely because a piece (or pieces) of legislation says it has to.

But records is thousands of years old.

And regulators - at least, the type that legislate the creation of records, are about fifty years old.

So today, organisations only practice records management because they’re made to.

But for thousands of years they did it without having to be told to by a regulator.

For thousands of years, it was understood that keeping a record was an inherently valuable activity.

It was also understood that professionals could make it a more valuable activity.

Then someone legislated records.

Made managing them in specific ways a requirement.

And somehow, instead of it making records more valuable.

It made it less valuable.

So now, people don't employ us unless legislation tells them to.

How did it happen?

What sources of value did we forget?

Personally, I think we forgot that most of the value in records comes from systematic ways of recording information.

I think we forgot about that part of records.

We became archivists (partly because we were largely being directed by archives).

We focused on systematic description of things that other people created, however badly they created them.

If we didn't become archivists, we ceded our role to IT - who took the central idea of records, and created business systems that make users create records in systematic ways.

Then we watched data management grow up around those systems when we abdicated our responsibility for managing the records created in them - because we called it "data."

What's really interesting now, is that there's a whole community of people springing up who are dedicated to records and record keeping (what I call record keeping, but lots of others might call record making).

They're not thinking of it like that, but it is.

Jorge Arango (of the informed life podcast among other things) has just released his latest book - it's called "duly noted: extend your mind through connected notes."

What is it about? I've only just picked it up, but on the surface, it's a book about records and how to make them so that life gets better (incidentally he's using Obsidian, which is the platform that this blog gets drafted on).

From his blurb - "Notes let you fulfill commitments, manage complicated projects, and make your ideas real. Digital notes take you further: using the right tools and a bit of discipline, you can cultivate a "personal knowledge garden" where your thinking will blossom."

It's all about records.

How do you think Copilot would go if it had a set of "personal knowledge gardens" and corporate knowledge gardens to ingest?

Instead of the personal and corporate dumping grounds that we all have instead?

He's not the only one helping people keep records to improve their lives.

Tiago Forte has a book and a whole business around the idea of "building a second brain" - which again, is just about systematic ways to record information to improve your life.

Go to the kindle store and search for note taking (ie. making records) and you'll get more than 3000 results. While some are off topic, there are pages and pages of books dedicated to helping people make better records to improve their jobs and their lives - everything from general purpose second brain type stuff, to university, taking better clinical histories, efficient learning, therapeutic note taking.

The point, is that there's a whole industry of people waking up to the idea that learning specific ways of making records can improve their lives and businesses.

And almost every time I write a post about how we (records management people) should be working with people to create better records by showing them better ways, I get ignored and treated like I don't know what I'm talking about, or I get shouted down by people who say things like "the business is responsible for quality" - like we're not part of the business.

In the long run, this will all be OK - like everything is OK in the end (because if it's not OK, it's not the end).

If there's value in making records better, and people can't get help from records on capturing that value, they'll just keep asking around until they find someone who will help them.

And then those people will get the power, budget and control value delivery from records.

And they’ll get it, independent of whether regulators decide to show up and regulat or not - because businesses know how to buy quality and productivity improvement.

I wonder what they'll call themselves?

Hopefully records managers.

But whether or not they do is largely up to us.

Whatever happens, the growing awareness that better ways of record making can improve people’s lives is an opportunity.

People are buying into it with absolutely no legislative or regulatory obligation to do so.

So our organisations probably will too.