61 results
Records, Information and Data
- Exploring the Role of Record Keeping in an Information Culture
- Geoffrey Yeo
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- Facet
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018
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This dynamic book considers whether and how the management of records (and archives) differs from the management of information (and data). Can archives and records management still make a distinctive contribution in the 21st century, or are they now being dissolved into a wider world of information governance? What should be our conceptual understanding of records in the digital era? What are the practical implications of the information revolution for the work of archivists and records managers? Geoffrey Yeo, a distinguished expert in the global field, explores concepts of ‘records’ and ‘archives’ and sets today’s record-keeping and archival practices in their historical context. He examines changing perceptions of records management and archival work, and asks whether and how far understandings derived from the fields of information management and data administration can enhance our knowledge of how records function. He argues that concepts of information and data cannot provide a fully adequate basis for reflective professional thinking about records and that record-keeping practices still have distinct and important roles to play in contemporary society.
4 - Finding a Way Through the Hall of Mirrors: Concepts of Information
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 85-104
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Summary
Introduction
Although in recent decades many archivists and records managers have wanted to characterise records in terms of information, few of them have felt it necessary to examine the possible meaning or meanings of the word ‘information’ or to discuss its significance in any detail. Information is often heralded as a concept that can help to explicate records and archives, but is seldom presented as a concept that may itself be in need of explication. Similarly, advocates of the new discipline of information governance sometimes offer definitions of ‘governance’ but rarely trouble to define the concept of information. Even the Encyclopedia of Archival Science (Duranti and Franks, 2015), which includes entries for ‘information assurance’, ‘information governance’, ‘information management’ and ‘information policy’, has no entry for ‘information’.
Why are records professionals so reluctant to scrutinise a concept that their profession has embraced with such apparent enthusiasm? One possible explanation is that information has proved difficult to delineate. As American philosopher Fred Dretske (1981, ix) remarked, ‘it is much easier to talk about information than it is to say what it is you are talking about’. But the most probable explanation of professional reticence is simply that the word ‘information’ has come to be so widely used in the discourse of contemporary society that most records professionals now perceive it as self-explanatory. We live in an information culture, in which we hear information mentioned so frequently that most of us feel no need to ask what kind of phenomenon it is.
Outside the field of archives and records, however, many scholars and practitioners have recognised that information is not a concept that we can simply take for granted. In the twin disciplines of librarianship and information science, in recent decades, numerous writers have taken up the challenge of elucidating what we might mean when we talk about information. Even a brief inspection of the writings on this subject reveals the scale of the difficulties that Dretske observed; the literature on the meaning of information is extensive but remains largely inconclusive. According to a philosopher of information science, ‘it has become a cliché to note that as many definitions of information have been suggested as there are writers on the topic’ (Furner, 2015, 364).
6 - Representation, Performativity and Social Action: Why Records Are Not (Just) Information
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 129-162
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Summary
Introduction
Despite the numerous voices proclaiming the value and importance of information and data in the contemporary world, it is far from clear that ideas about information and data can provide an adequate basis for comprehending how records work. This chapter sets out an alternative approach and suggests that records professionals may find it more rewarding to understand records as representations. It offers a brief introduction to concepts of representation and explores some of the ways in which representations are deployed in human interaction. It also examines how viewing records as representations can provide a starting-point for investigating their relationships to activities and events, their performative aspects and their varied roles in society. Instead of seeing records as primarily informational, this chapter argues that record-making is always intimately bound to contexts of social action.
Representations
Although concepts of representation have not traditionally played a major part in professional understandings of records, they have been widely discussed in many other disciplines, including art, film and media studies, linguistics, philosophy and psychology. A represent - ation is something that stands, or is believed to stand, for something else. Examples of representations include charts, diagrams, models, statues, pictures, gestures, dramatic performances and musical notations. Language and writing are also often said to be forms of representation.
Commentators have frequently noted that no representation can capture every aspect of the phenomenon it seeks to represent. Representations are always partial.1 Nevertheless, we encounter them everywhere. Some are primarily aesthetic, but many have practical functions as surrogates for things that would otherwise be absent or inaccessible (Ankersmit, 2001; Cummins, 1996). Representations – and ideas about representation – can help us to comprehend the material and social world in which we live and to make sense of many aspects of human behaviour and experience.
We may find that viewing records as representations is more productive than attempting to view them in informational terms. More specifically, we can see records as representations of occurrents. Occurrents are phenomena that have, or are perceived to have, an ending in time. A record stands for an occurrent and remains available after the occurrent has ceased (Yeo, 2007; 2008).
2 - Thinking About Records and Archives; the Transition to the Digital
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 29-60
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Summary
Introduction
If archivists or records managers in the early 21st century were asked to conjure up a mental picture of a record, most would probably think of a unit of written text. Textual records have long been at the heart of archival endeavour, and archival institutions now hold vast numbers of them. Conceptually, however, records cannot be confined to textual domains. Particularly in preliterate or semi-literate societies – as the previous chapter suggested – records have often taken the form of three-dimensional artefacts. Drawings, sketches and visual charts can record what happened in the past, and static photographic images have come to fulfil a similar role. Archival scholar Anne Gilliland (2017, 54) has noted how physical artefacts and visual depictions can serve record-keeping needs for those deprived of other means of recording, as in the case of the cloth arpilleras woven by women in 20thcentury Chile to document their experiences under a repressive government. In contemporary societies, records can also include moving images and sound recordings; video recordings of a meeting or conference, and audio recordings of an interview or telephone conversation, are all recognisable as records of the events concerned. Nevertheless, for most records professionals, these are not the examples that immediately come to mind when the concept of a ‘record’ is under discussion; in professional discourse, records and written text often seem to belong together. Using terminology developed in the 1970s by psychologist Eleanor Rosch, we may say that – for most archivists and records managers in contemporary western societies – a ‘prototypical’ record is largely or wholly textual.
American psychologist Eleanor Rosch developed ‘prototype theory’ as a means of understanding human approaches to categorisation (Rosch, 1978; Smith and Medin, 1981). Rosch and her associates suggested that most conceptual categories have prototypes, which are usually envisaged as mental mappings of typical features: for example, having feathers, an ability to fly and a propensity to build nests might be typical features of a member of the category of ‘birds’. A prototype of a bird is likely to be a mental composite of features such as these.
Prototype theory affirms that category membership is graded, and that candidates for membership of a category are assessed in terms of their similarity to a mental prototype.
7 - Managing Information or Managing Records?
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 163-190
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Summary
Introduction
The view that information is an affordance – an intangible benefit that records or other resources afford to those who use them in particular ways – is not a view likely to be shared by proponents of ‘information management’. Influential voices now affirm that, at least in organ - izational settings, information is an objective commodity, which can and should be controlled, managed and systematised. Other voices, often equally influential, affirm that record-keeping and information management practices have converged and that there is now, or should now be, no effective difference between them. Yet we have seen that, at a conceptual level, our understandings of records and our understandings of information diverge considerably. Records play complex roles in social action, which transcend the capture or supply of information; ideas about information are commonplace in writings about record-keeping, but do not appear to provide an adequate basis for comprehending the complexity of records and their functioning in human society. We seem to have reached a point of critical difficulty, especially if we want to build bridges between conceptual understandings and the field of professional practice.
With this difficulty in mind, this chapter looks more closely at how information and its management are perceived by information managers, and at how the concepts and working practices of ‘information management’ – as they are commonly understood by information managers and data administrators – relate to concepts and practices of record-keeping. Building on the arguments put forward in earlier chapters, it examines points of contact as well as points of divergence, but concludes that record-keeping has different aims and scope and must therefore remain a distinct practice.
Conceptions and practices of ‘information management’: information as proposition
Although the term ‘information management’ is widely used, and its practice widely advocated, in government agencies and commercial businesses in 21st-century western societies, its conceptual framework and operational scope are not always wholly clear. Its proponents rarely agree on precisely what is meant by ‘information’, and sometimes affirm that each organization needs to define the term in its own way to suit its own needs.
Introduction
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp vii-xvi
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Summary
It is often said that we live in an information age. Our ability to deploy information creatively, we are told, makes our lives today radically different from those of our ancestors. One commentator has affirmed that we are experiencing a ‘third wave’ in the way that humans organise their affairs, and that new forms of society based on information are superseding the agricultural and industrial societies of the first and second waves (Toffler, 1980). Another commentator, using a different metaphor and a different approach to enumerating change, has described a ‘fourth revolution’ founded on information: a revolution whose achievements may alter our understandings of human existence as profoundly as the earlier ‘revolutions’ generated by the works of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud (Floridi, 2014). Although information was not always highly esteemed in the past, it is now widely perceived as ‘the stuff of human communication’, a constitutive force in society and a ‘universal principle’ at work in the world (Balnaves and Willson, 2011, 4–6, 31).
Claims such as these need not be accepted uncritically, but cannot be ignored; our contemporary environment is undoubtedly one in which information is accorded a leading role. In the sub-title of this book, I refer to this phenomenon as an ‘information culture’. Other writers have sometimes understood ‘information culture’ as the range of attitudes towards information shown by the staff of a particular organization; from this perspective, ‘an organization has a mature information culture when it … easily … uses information in its everyday activities’ (Svärd, 2017, xi). Writers who adopt this view tend to assume that information belongs in an organizational context and that the main issue to be addressed is the extent to which an organization's employees acknowledge the value of information and the benefits of using it. This book, however, challenges some of these assumptions. It suggests that notions of information as a beneficial commodity cannot simply be taken for granted, and it places ‘information culture’ at societal rather than primarily organizational level, using the term in a broadly similar way to writers such as Steven Lubar (1999) and Luke Tredinnick (2008), to refer to a contemporary culture in which leading figures in governments, universities, the computer industry and the popular media promote information as a commodity of central importance.
5 - Records and Data
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 105-128
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Summary
Introduction
If the writings of contemporary pundits are correct, we live not only in an age of information, but also in an age of data. In literature aimed at the corporate business market, much of the rhetoric that has come to surround concepts of information is often transferred to a parallel discourse about data. We can read, for example, of the importance of efficient enterprise data management, of data governance frameworks and of a need to recognise data as a ‘valuable and manageable organizational asset’ (Bhansali, 2014, 9–10). In the 2010s, organizations have increasingly sought to take advantage of new data analytic techniques to improve decision-making or business activities; many now aim to ‘monetise’ data, exploiting their corporate data in creative ways to become more competitive and profitable (Cohen and Kotorov, 2016; Marr, 2017).
Interest in data analysis and exploitation is not confined to commercial enterprises. Governments, political parties, police forces, scientists and health care providers are all now seeking to analyse digital data to enhance their operations. Data science and data administration, although newly emerging as professions, are rapidly expanding areas of employment in many countries, and the worlds of data analysis and curation have become major fields of research. As Jonathan Furner observed:
There seems to be no doubt that both data science and data studies are here to stay as discrete areas of inquiry. Levels of interest in the development and application of tools and techniques for the analysis of … data are high and constantly rising, as are levels of interest in the study of the sociocultural, political, and economic contexts in
which data is created and used. (Furner, 2015, 369)When European records professionals consider data, they often think of data protection law, whose connections to record-keeping are well established. Records retention, security and privacy must increasingly be addressed in the context of European regulations concerned with trans-border data flows (Montaña, 2016; Sautter, 2011, 25–6). More recently, discussions about data have extended to big data (exponentially growing volumes of analysable data arising from the proliferation of computers across business, government and the wider community), open data (proactive release of public sector data for sharing, redistribution and creative reuse) and other flavours of data that may also appear to be connected with records.
4 - Can we keep everything? The future of appraisal in a world of digital profusion
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- By Geoffrey Yeo, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Information Studies at University College London (UCL).
- Edited by Caroline Brown
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- Archival Futures
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- Facet
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- 01 June 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 45-64
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter asks whether we might begin to develop a vision of digital archives where nothing is ever destroyed. Today, proponents of ‘big data’ often argue that appraisal and selection are obsolescent. Can we – should we – try to keep everything, as many computing specialists now suggest? What place will selection and destruction practices have in a future digital world where storing everything may seem easier than incurring the costs and complexities of appraisal?
Selective retention
Decisions about destruction have been made since the earliest days of record-making. It has sometimes been thought that records in earlier times were intended to be permanent, and that keepers of records played no part in their destruction, until the practice of retaining everything had to be abandoned in the face of the growing physical bulk of records in the 20th century. Systematic destruction practices, however, have a much longer history. In the palaces and cities of the ancient world, accounting records were often routinely destroyed within a year of their creation (Eidem, 2011, 13; Palaima, 2003). In 1731, instructions were issued to the Royal Archives of Sardinia that ‘useless papers’ should be destroyed (Duchein, 1992, 17); three decades later, French archivist Pierre-Camille Le Moine similarly insisted on the destruction of seemingly trivial items (Delsalle, 1998, 154). In the UK, the Public Record Office Act of 1877 authorised the disposal of records thought insufficiently valuable (Cantwell, 1991, 277–80). The 20thcentury appraisal methodologies articulated by Theodore Schellenberg (1956) formalised and encouraged these practices, but the origins of selectivity are much older.
Before digital technology became widely available, archival writers routinely put forward two arguments in favour of selective destruction: the need to save costly storage space and the difficulty of finding and using ‘important’ material if archives are congested with supposedly useless ephemera. These arguments appear in very similar form in the work of Charles Johnson in the early 20th century and in the writings of Gerald Ham in the century's final decade (Ham, 1993, 3; Johnson, 1919, 43–4). Although Hilary Jenkinson (1922) refused to allow the archivist any part in selection, many later writers saw a specific role for archivists in ‘fashioning … a manageable historical record’ (Ham, 1993, 3).
1 - The Making and Keeping of Records: a Brief Historical Overview
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 1-28
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Summary
Written down so as not to forget.
Mesopotamian clay tablet, about 3200 years ago (Postgate, 2013, 198)Things that we are unable to hold in our weak and fragile memories are conserved by writing.
Burgundian charter, about 850 years ago (Fentress and Wickham, 1992, 8)‘I shall never, never forget!’ [said the White King]. ‘You will, though,’ the Queen said, ‘if you don't make a memorandum of it’.
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (Carroll, 1872)Introduction
The making and keeping of records appear to be among the oldest human activities. As far as we can tell, they are distinctively human activities; no other species has developed them in the same way. As well as being dependent on changing technologies, they are deeply entwined in social conventions and have been undertaken very differently at different times and in different places. Records have often been associated with literacy and the use of written texts, but the first records were undoubtedly made long before writing was invented. As record-making and record-keeping practices matured, they came to underpin governments, institutions and commercial businesses in formal public realms; they have sometimes – although not always – been less responsive to the needs of individuals, informal communities or minority groups. This chapter looks at some of the key aspects of their historical development. It aims to set a context for the record-making and record-keeping practices of our own era, by examining some of the ways in which records have been perceived, used, valued and protected in the past.
Record-making and record-keeping over 10,000 years
In today's western societies, we can use an extensive range of tools and artefacts to assist us when we need to recall what was said or done at earlier moments. We often take such tools for granted, but we also know that people in earlier eras were not always able to call on them. In prehistoric times, spoken language enabled our distant ancestors to communicate and share memories with others, but the long-term survival of memories must have depended on mental recollection and perhaps on ceremonies, recitations or rituals that may have helped to protect them from oblivion.
Contents
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp v-vi
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Frontmatter
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 07 August 2018, pp i-iv
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Index
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 201-208
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3 - Archivists, Records Managers and the Rise of Information
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 61-84
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Summary
Introduction
In October 1947, Sir Hilary Jenkinson, the doyen of 20th-century English archivists, gave a lecture to inaugurate the newly established archival education programme at University College London. Jenkinson used this auspicious occasion to describe the curriculum that he thought appropriate for students of archives. In the part of his lecture devoted to ‘the attainments necessary for the Complete Archivist’ (Jenkinson, 1948, 14), he expounded the need for pros - pective archivists to study administrative history, diplomatic, palaeography and repository methods and techniques. He emphasised the importance of conservation and custody, and spoke of the use of records in academic research and the relations between the archivist and the historian. He also addressed the subject of evidence, and – in a resounding conclusion to the lecture – proclaimed the ‘sanctity of evidence’ as the archivist's creed.
But Jenkinson said nothing about information as a subject of study for archivists; it played no part in his proposed curriculum. Although he knew the word ‘information’ and used it occasionally in other contexts, he probably never expected that, over time, information would become a significant motif in archival discourse. Today, however, the study of information seems predominant. In the early 21st century, archival education appears to have found a home in the iSchools movement, which seeks to provide scholarly environments where ‘issues of information’ are addressed and expertise in the use of information is developed (Cox and Larsen, 2011, 13, 26). At University College London, the School of Librarianship and Archives (as it was called in Jenkinson's day) has been renamed the Department of Information Studies. It now claims to educate students for ‘the information professions’ and its website describes archives and records management as an ‘information discipline’.
These changes reflect wider trends that can be observed in contemporary society and in the world of record-keeping. In recent years, records management organizations in several countries have changed their names or adjusted their preferred terminology. The Records Management Society of Great Britain has become the Information and Records Management Society. The former Records Management Association of Australasia is now Records and Infor - mation Management Professionals Australasia. In the USA, members of the professional association ARMA International have also largely rejected the term ‘records management’ in favour of ‘records and information management’ as a label for their disciplinary practice.
Concluding Thoughts: Record-Keeping Present and Future
- Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
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- Records, Information and Data
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- 24 September 2019
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- 07 August 2018, pp 191-200
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This book has presented a view of records and information that is substantially different from the views presented in most contemporary textbooks and published guidelines about organizational recordkeeping. It has rejected attempts to characterise records simply as containers of information, or as a special kind of information that demands stricter control. Instead, it has offered an understanding of records as persistent representations through which social acts are performed, and an understanding of information as one of the many affordances that records offer to those who engage with them. In proposing these understandings, it has attempted to put forward fuller arguments than are usually found in writings about records and information, where the views that records contain information, or are a category of information, are often asserted but rarely argued in any depth.
Almost certainly, many readers of this book will find its approach controversial. Some may object to its questioning of the ‘information paradigm’ for records, in which leading players in records management have made so much investment; others may insist that record-keeping is essentially pragmatic and may doubt the relevance of concepts and ideas borrowed or adapted from academic disciplines such as philosophy and psychology. Practitioners of information management or information governance are unlikely to want to see information as an affordance. In early-21st-century writings addressed to businesses and government agencies, information is almost always presented as an organizational ‘asset’, a measurable entity that can be managed for an organization's benefit and regulated to ensure security and compliance – a view of information that sees it as a material entity and associates it with some of the central concerns long allied with records management. The arguments in this book, however, rest on a belief that robust professional practice should always be grounded in robust professional theory, and on a conviction that professional theories cannot be wholly self-contained but must draw on other fields of knowledge. The book problematises the notion of information assets and suggests that the ‘assets’ that are the usual focus of information management – at least when that elusive term is used in the sense discussed in Chapter 7 – can best be understood, not as autonomous information, but as contestable propositions asserted at particular times and in particular contexts.
Foreword to the second edition
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- By Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
- Laura A. Millar
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Seven years after Laura Millar's eloquent and wide-ranging book was first published, it is ever more apparent that in future the great majority of records will be created and used in digital form. At present, most record-making environments are hybrid – to varying extents, paper records continue to be created and kept alongside their digital counterparts – but the balance is firmly shifting towards the digital. Organizations are now disposing of their filing cabinets at an unprecedented rate. Even if the wholly paperless office may still prove to be a chimera, the ‘less-paper’ office is now a visible reality. It has also become clear that archivists will very soon face, if they are not already facing, a digital deluge. The world is creating massive amounts of digital content, and the archivists of the future will encounter quantities of records that exceed anything that archivists have experienced in the past. In this age of digital abundance, human society will still look for evidence of, and information about, actions that have been undertaken, events that have occurred, decisions that have been made, and rights that have been protected, abused or amended. Records and archives will still be needed, and the long-standing archival principles that Millar expounds will be no less valid, but the methods and techniques required to put those principles into practice will often be very different.
In this new and extensively revised second edition, Millar provides greatly expanded coverage of digital concerns. In place of the separate chapter on digital archives that concluded the first edition, discussion of digital issues is now woven into every chapter of the book. Of course, we still have – and will continue to have – the legacy of many centuries of archives created using paper and other analogue media; the skills to manage records created in the past by non-digital means will remain essential, and Millar does not neglect them. But in recasting her book to take account of the fast-moving digital revolution, she offers us an archival manual for the twenty-first century.
Introduction to the Series
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- By Geoffrey Yeo
- David Thomas, Simon Fowler
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- Book:
- The Silence of the Archive
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- Facet
- Published online:
- 08 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 11 May 2017, pp ix-xii
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Records and archives are important resources for individuals, organizations and the wider community. Records are created in the course of the functions and activities of organizations and the personal lives of individuals, and are preserved and maintained to support business and accountability and for cultural use. They provide evidence of, and information about, the actions of their creators and the environment in which those actions occurred. They extend and corroborate human and corporate memory and play a critical role in maintaining awareness of how the present is shaped by the past. Records are kept by almost everyone, but their management (and especially their medium-term and long-term management) is a professional discipline with its own distinctive body of knowledge. Within the discipline, ‘records’ and ‘archives’ are sometimes used as synonyms, but in English-speaking countries ‘archives’ usually denotes records which have been recognized as having long-term value. The term ‘archives’ can also be used more widely, to refer to collections of materials maintained by organizations, individuals, families or community groups, or to the locations where such materials are held.
The series Principles and Practice in Records Management and Archives aims both to disseminate and to add to the body of professional knowledge and understanding. Each text in the series is intended to offer a detailed overview of one or more key topics. The archives and records management discipline is experiencing rapid changes – not least as a result of the digital revolution – and the series aims to reflect the new technological context as well as the societal changes and governmental initiatives in many countries that are placing new emphases on compliance, accountability, access to information, community relations and participative culture. Some volumes in the series address theoretical and strategic issues relating to the creation, management and interpretation of records and archives or their role in society; others give practical guidance for those seeking successful and effective ways of managing them and presenting them to users. The authors come from many countries worldwide and are recognized experts in the field.
Foreword to the first edition
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- By Geoffrey Yeo, University College London
- Laura A. Millar
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Archives and records are important resources for individuals, organizations and the wider community. They provide evidence of, and information about, the actions of individuals, organizations and communities and the environments in which those actions occurred. They extend and corroborate human and corporate memory and play a critical role in maintaining awareness of how the present is shaped by the past. As Laura Millar notes in this book, they are among the tools we can use to help us understand where we came from and where we are going.
Record keeping has a long history. The Gilgamesh epic, originating almost fifty centuries ago, tells how a woman made marks on a wall to record the number of days that Gilgamesh slept. Notched sticks or bones were often used in preliterate societies as a means of recording work done, livestock counted or hunting expeditions successfully concluded. The invention of writing opened the way to more sophisticated methods of recording actions and events, and also to the possibility of communicating information and sending orders and requests by methods other than word of mouth. Letter-writing has been used for correspondence for over four thousand years, and at a very early stage in its development our ancestors discovered that a letter could serve the dual purpose of communicating a message across space and preserving it across time. In early civilizations in Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, the ability to refer back to what had been said and done in the past without having to rely solely on mental recollection supported the development of new methods of government and commerce and systems to monitor the accountability of individuals or workgroups charged by the ruler with particular tasks. Later came the discovery that writing could be used not merely to record but also to create a range of abstract phenomena such as permissions, obligations, commitments and agreements, and to provide evidence of their creation in the event of disputes.
Written records serve these purposes merely by virtue of their persistence – their ability to endure beyond the cessation of the actions they represent – but for at least four millennia people have seen the benefit of setting them aside and organizing their storage in dedicated repositories. As records proliferated, many such repositories were established in the ancient world.
A Real-Life Snapshot of the Use and Abuse of Urinary Catheters on General Medical Wards
- Geoffrey Harley, Ai Li Yeo, Rhonda L. Stuart, Claire Dendle
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- Journal:
- Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology / Volume 32 / Issue 12 / December 2011
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 January 2015, pp. 1216-1218
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- December 2011
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An observational study was performed on 2 wards in a tertiary hospital to determine staff awareness, knowledge, and documentation of catheter use and the effects these have on duration of catheterization. Overall, there was poor knowledge of the indications and date of catheterization. Doctor awareness decreases duration of catheterization.
Managing Records in Global Financial Markets
- Ensuring Compliance and Mitigating Risk
- Principles and Practice in Records Management and Archives
- Edited by Lynn Coleman, Victoria Lemieux, Rod Stone, Geoffrey Yeo
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- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 08 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2011
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Although there are a number of publications covering records management generically, very few are focused on the challenges for business, and global business in particular, and fewer still on regulatory, legal and governance issues associated with managing records in the global banking and financial sector. This book fills the gap by exploring these complex issues and offers strategies and frameworks to meet the record-keeping challenges to which they give rise in investment banking and other global financial services. While the book focuses on the financial sector, it will also be of relevance to multinational businesses in other sectors, covering as it does the issues that arise from operating across borders and in different jurisdictions. The book is divided into four main parts which cover: regulatory and legal compliance, balancing risk and return, litigation-related issues, and record-keeping approaches. Expert contributors to the book come from Europe, North America and Australasia and include legal, regulatory and technology specialists as well as records managers and archivists. Whilst the book reflects recognized records management principles, the accessible language used will assure its value to information professionals and others without a formal records management background. This book will be essential reading for records managers, archivists and information professionals who manage records in the financial sector. It will also be invaluable for individuals in a wide range of disciplines who rely on records, and their effective management, to meet the increasing number of legal and regulatory obligations to which financial institutions and global businesses are now subject. These include compliance professionals, privacy and data protection officers, risk managers and IT specialists, together with the senior managers, directors and chief operating officers who have ultimate accountability for ensuring compliance and mitigating risk.
Part 4 - Record-keeping approaches
- Edited by Lynn Coleman, Victoria Lemieux, Rod Stone, Geoffrey Yeo
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- Book:
- Managing Records in Global Financial Markets
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 08 June 2018
- Print publication:
- 23 August 2011, pp 179-180
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