Blogs

I was listening to a day-long presentation on Records Management and developments in the industry by Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer the other day.

On my way to the event I was catching up on my twitter stream, a post caught my eyes. Do you remember the announcement that the Library of Congress is going to archive the entire twitter stream? Well this particular post pointed out a service that promises to delete all tweets before the 6 month deadline expires. All you need to do is add #NoLOC to your tweets and the magic will happen. Apart from losing 7 character (yes, I know the tag is only 6 letters, but we need a blank as well ), the other question I have is: if you do not want your tweets to be archived by the Library of Congress, for whatever reason, would you want them to be visible and easily findable for 6 months through the use of the tag? To me it sounds like an interesting Tag to follow!

And what about the needs of record management according to ISO 15489 that talk about authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability if Tweets are missing from the stream. I also wonder about privacy and cross-border / European privacy legislation as well. Regardless of what the Terms and Conditions say, there is bound to be a challenge sooner or later about this.

The whole debate reminds me of an initiative from the National Library in the UK. Every now and then, they internally pick up EVERY piece of paper, every message and electronic document as a snapshot of “a day in the life of”. It is nothing more than that, a cross-section of the what is available, with no time-line, not necessarily complete, but interesting as an exercise. The potential risks are not quantified.

Both activities underline an interesting side-effect. It is all about context. With the many dynamic combination of information from a large amount of different sources, do we really know how and if any guidelines currently available cover our compliancy and records management needs? Is it even relevant?

With Enterprise 2.0 becoming more and more real and significant in Enterprises across the world and the risks also being better understood, those strange bed follows of Enterprise 2.0 and traditional Records Management will have to work together… and that within the context of business where access and engagement may be more important than risk mitigation.

AIIMs John Mancini did a presentation on exactly this and you can find it on Slideshare right here.

Records Management in the context of Enterprise 2.0 is a challenge that needs careful consideration and a weighing of the risks versus the call of many a vendor that says it is OK to save everything. Which way is the discussion going in your organization? Or do you keep Enterprise 2.0 tools outside of your Information Infrastructure and do you use traditional enterprise tools to capture content that falls under a Records management regime?

Let me know, I would interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.