The existence of available technologies to easily record conversations, meetings and other events in audio and/or video formats got me thinking about the future of records and records creation. I recently attended a number of workshops where my role was the note taker. Although I was taking notes, an audio recording of the workshop was also captured with the express purpose of being used to verify my notes, after which the recordings would be destroyed. While reviewing my notes against the recordings to fill in gaps, I noticed that I missed things due to two main reasons:
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People were talking too fast for me to keep up with the note taking
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When I didn’t recognize the terms or subjects being discussed, the words didn’t translate into my notes because I was unfamiliar with them.
For this reason, the audio recording was extremely useful, but it got me thinking about what is the record. While filling in the gaps, the temptation was there to make a word-for-word transcription because sometimes it’s difficult to tell what will be useful later. But then I remembered that wasn’t the point of the exercise and the “official” record was really my interpreted distillation of the event. And then I thought that even if I made an exact transcription, I was still going to be missing visual and aural cues, such as seeing how people reacted and hearing the tones used when speaking, which to me is also part of the event.
Now that the capabilities and technologies are available to record and store everything so easily, at what point are we declaring a record? And in what format should that record be? I’ve heard that some organizations make audio recordings of meetings and index them instead of taking minutes. After all the hand-cramping note taking during the workshops I’ve naturally become an advocate of this practice, but my feeling is still that it doesn’t offer the same benefit as recording minutes in the traditional way.
For one thing, written minutes of a meeting distill the conversation down to its essential key points, decisions, and outcomes resulting from the discussion. This important interpretation is missing from an audio recording of the entire event that would require a person to listen for long periods of time to get to the point. This is something that could probably be accomplished more easily with a couple pages of notes.
Another point is how search capabilities are impacted when working with a written record versus an audio or video recording. A written record allows people the opportunity to do keyword searches on a particular term and to see it in all of the contexts in which it was spoken. With an audio/video recording, the reliance is mostly on the indexing and this also assumes that every conversation happens in a linear fashion, which is often not the case. Sometimes something important about one topic is mentioned casually in the context of another topic. With a transcription or notes, it’s easy to search for this term and see all the places it appears. This is not the case with an audio recording, unless it has been indexed meticulously. When I have to review my notes of the workshops, I would much rather read through a few pages of text to find what I need rather than listening to the whole recording. With the latter method, I’m not guaranteed to find the exact place where something was mentioned if it’s not in alignment with the indexing.
Is it a good idea to record every meeting or videoconference just because the option exists? And would you ever use that recording? Does that become the record because it captures the event most accurately? Or is the record the one that documents your interpretation and any key outcomes of the event, which is essentially capturing the transaction that’s an essential component of records creation.