The quality of record keeping and being attached to archival practice

The quality of most record keeping is astoundingly low.

Should we be surprised by that?

Record keeping is a skill.

Like every skill, it gains from experience, and training, and if you're a specialist and you focus on your craft, you'll accrue more experience and training in a few years than non-specialists will gain in a lifetime.

So it might then seem strange that there's quite a bit of debate in records management circles about whose responsibility quality is.

What is the logical conclusion though of the people with the most skill refusing to take responsibility for quality?

Personally, I think there's only one conclusion in that situation - record quality will continue to be astoundingly low until the people with the most skill start taking responsibility for it.

I think it's possible to make a case that a discipline has got off track when discipline with the most skill, and the most ability to produce a good result refuses to be the one producing it.

I think that we've fallen into it because we've stopped differentiating clearly between record keeping skill, and archival management skill.

Most of what we now call records management, is practice that I believe actually falls into archival management.

You can tell, because we're not focused on managing the quality of record keeping - managing the quality of the records that are entering the archive.

It's archival management, because we're focused on the quality of how the records we're brought by others are described by metadata and classification - whatever awful, steaming piles of rotten garbage they are, we are determined to make them well described awful, steaming piles of rotten garbage.

If we were focused on quality of recordkeeping, we'd be working with the people recording their information, and building business systems.

If we were focused on the quality of recordkeeping, we'd have bought into business systems 40 years ago - because that's where the best record keeping is happening.

That's where the best appraisal (as in iso15489 appraisal, not archival appraisal) is going on - business analysts and people building systems are sitting down every day to consider the business risks that can be mitigated by keeping better records - and then they're designing business systems to make specific records.

Of course, I don't think this is our fault.

It's a transition problem.

50 years ago when business systems were starting to be built, there was still so much paper to manage.

Our concept of what a record was still said that it was something physical.

Record production was manual - so the cost of production was high (relative to today) so there was still a natural economy that I think meant people kept quality comparatively high quality records (or at least created small quantities of crap).

Printing volumes were still actually going up until about ten years ago - so there was always more paper to manage.

So it's understandable.

The important question is, what does it mean for the future of records management?

A whole other industry has grown up around delivering high quality records at ever higher velocity and volume.

Where does that leave us?