Records management is undermined by a lack of theory about record making
It’s a strange blindspot.
People in the profession seem to occupy one of two positions. Either we look at records as being for accountability, or we’re archivists, and records accumulate. They’re both about what comes after. Neither perspective understands why the information was recorded. Records management in particular falls into this trap. The trap is conceptual in nature, we fail to differentiate between our concept of the accountability that the record supports - the activity that made it, and why it was made. The two seem very close together, but accountability is generally a purpose we ascribe afterwards. If we consider records as keys for specific locks, the record was almost always created to be a different key for a different lock.
It’s a gap, and it creates problems.
The main problem, is that it leaves us unaware of what we are disturbing when we try and have recorded information arranged to suit our needs. We don’t understand how and why the records were made, so we don’t understand their organising logic, and the significance to the work that is being done. Because we can’t see that significance, we see no problem in disturbing the way other groups arrange their records - we see only that our arrangement will be an improvement because at least then, we will understand it.
There is also a symptom of this problem present in the stories we tell ourselves about records and archives. We talk of glorious history, of the wonders of old artefacts well kept, and how we know snippets of what happened thousands of years ago. We talk about how we will be able to KNOW if people have stepped out of line - regardless of whether anyone else wants to know that.
It is a wonder - there is no getting away from that.
But it’s a secondary wonder.
The primary wonder has already happened. The wonder of meaning shared across space and time. Meaning transferred with fidelity from past self to future self or other self, and available at the moment of need.
When we put this wonder next to our own, we have to recognise that our wonder is the secondary wonder - and really hold that. When we forget it, we fail to consider that when we disturb the primary wonder, there are two possible outcomes - we destroy the transfer of meaning, or we are worked around by people who recognise that theirs is the primary task, and they are closer to the records - so simply put, they can cut us off from them. When one of these outcomes occur, either our records are useless because the meaning was never transferred to people who needed to get work done (so the only thing we can prove is that the task failed), or our repositories are empty.
The interesting thing to me, is that the modern world hasn’t stopped, and I see two types of repositories - those in which we are not allowed to intervene, and those which are almost empty. The gap, is that we don’t actually have a theory of record making. Without it, we can’t deal with the challenge of modern records management - which is the challenge of truly moving on from custodial practices, and into records management practices which can be well integrated with business information and management practices.