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Records Management in the Age of Facebook

By Jesse Wilkins posted 06-27-2011 15:09

  

 

One of the key themes of the AIIM Social Business Virtual Event on September 8 is governance - in fact we've built an entire track around it. But when we think about governance there are some challenges unique to social media that underscore just how far we've pulled the "paper paradigm." 
 
In classic records theory, records are identified and managed according to their content, not their format. So is a Facebook "Like" a record? If so, how do you capture it, and declare it as a record, and manage it in your repository, and authenticate it as needed, and produce it for discovery, and disposition it at the end of its lifecycle? (We'll leave the notion of a Facebook Like or a ReTweet as permanent record as an exercise for the reader.)
 
What about co-created content - that is, the sum of a blog post and relevant (or not!) comments, or aggregations of photos based on tags, or the content of a user's Twitter stream or Facebook activity streams that aggregate a variety of content?
 
In other words, the "paper paradigm" simply doesn't stretch far enough to cover all the nuances available in common social media tools. Some records management principles remain applicable, but in too many organizations we're trying to shoehorn a very large and sharp square into the round hole of the existing records program. It is time - and indeed past time - to start critically evaluating how we as information management professionals manage content created using social processes and technologies.
 
I have some thoughts on those challenges and how information management practices must evolve in order to address them - but you'll have to attend the AIIM Social Business Virtual Event on September 8 to hear them. 


#Records-Management #legalhold #socialmedia #ElectronicRecordsManagement #SocialBusiness #governance #ERM
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