Records, the limitations of metadata, and the assumptions underlying what we do
If you had to just choose one of these statements -
"So that we have the records"
"So that we have high quality records"
Which would you choose?
Hopefully I'm in the right room and option 2 was your choice.
Here's a practical analogy that gets to the question.
If you have a bucket of water, how much difference does the quality of the bucket make to the quality of the water that's in it?
Put another way, if you had the choice of scooping your drinking water out of a sewer pit, or out of a pristine stream in the middle of the arctic wilderness, would it make a difference to you whether your bucket cost $1 or $50?
Obviously - no matter how good the quality of your bucket, you'd never drink the water from the sewer pit.
Similarly, if you were stockpiling water for the purpose of drinking it, how much would it matter that you'd described the water really well if the source of your water was the aforementioned sewer pit?
Not at all.
You'd know it was undrinkable - and that's a plus, but you'd have to ask some serious questions about why you were stockpiling undrinkable sewerage water.
What's the point of all this?
Simple - we're storing crap in high quality buckets as though the buckets can make a difference to the quality of the crap we're storing.
Then we're having arguments about why we should keep the high quality bucket based on the fact that it gives us a certain standard of metadata.
It does have some advantages - in 20 years time we'll have really well described crap.
We'll be able to tell people in great detail just how bad the records from 20 years ago were.
This has come about for the simple reason that we've made an assumption.
The assumption us simple.
We're records managers.
There's an unstated assumption that we're just here to manage what others create.
The assumption is that it's worth managing.
Under that assumption is another one.
That the people keeping the records know how to do it well.
That they know how to keep a high quality record that will serve the purposes that they need it to.
The simple fact is, that the assumption is a bad one.
People generally don't know what good recordkeeping is about.
They think it's something accountants do.
Then they spend their entire lives trying to work out where they were up to with a business process, and remember what was happening so that they know what to do next.
The problem, is that recordkeeping isn't something that accountants do - but we could make an argument that they're one of the few groups that do it well.
Knowing what to record and when is a real skill.
What's interesting, is that if you go and read ISO15489, section 7 asks us to use records practices to manage business risk.
Which means it asks us to focus on the record keeping.
Who actually does that though?
I'd argue that it's not records people.
I'd argue that it's people with "risk" in their title.
Or people designing business systems - business analysts, data analysts, architects.
In making the assumption that what people are creating is worth keeping, we've taken ourselves off the hook for teaching people about what good recordkeeping looks like.
So people are producing garbage.
Then we try and convince our organisations that they should fund amazingly expensive systems and get the whole organisation to change their practices so that we can have "compliant" metadata schemes - to describe the garbage really well, like it makes any kind of difference to the work the organisation does.
And along have come all of these other groups who know that whatever it's called, all the risk is best managed, and gains produced at the keeping phase - when the information and knowledge is recorded.
And they don't much care what system that's in - as long as it works consistently for everyone who needs it.
And they've taken over the most valuable part of records.
We let it happen.
But we can take it back.
We just have to care about the quality of the records that people are creating - and help them produce better ones.