I was more active than usual in the MARAC meeting that wrapped up successfully this weekend. I taught my first workshop (on Web 2.0, with a fellow blogger) and a colleague and I were responsible for introducing a new track of discussion sessions. As soon as my workshop partner gets the slides up, I’ll write about that event and give a link to our slides. In the meantime I’ll go out of chronological order and write about some of the discussion sessions. But I’d also like to solicit people who attended some of the other sessions–particularly the ones on using Web 2.0 for education and the future of MARAC–to serve as “guest bloggers.” Let me know if you want to write up a summary for me to post.
The effervescent Geof Huth lead the discussion session on electronic records. The conversation took a bit of a different turn than the one we had expected. We thought this might be an opportunity for people to talk about the concrete problems they were having in their archives and get advice from their peers. Instead it turned out to be more of a philosophical conversation (not that there’s anything wrong with that). What follows is a summary of my notes–remember that it was a discussion so things jumped around quite a bit.
Geof began by asking how many people were actually working with electronic records (show of hands). Then he asked of the people who had not raised their hands, why not? He then raised some of the points he thought might be holding people back from addressing electronic records (hereafter ER) issues:
- fear of technology
- lack of records management expertise
- the need to be involved with records creation
- the fact that with ER things are “slippery,” responsibilities are less clear, and
- a desire to wait for the uber-solution to be delivered to solve the problem.
A recurring theme was that many of the challenges presented by ER were essentially needs for good fundamental records management. Another theme was the increased need for archivists to “get out of the basement” and work with people–records creators, IT staff, records management staff. Some saw this as a good thing; being more active in the records management end of things gave them more visibility. Many people said they had difficulties getting their IT staff to work with them and understand their needs (for example, for server space). In response others advised looking for support from the general counsel’s office or the auditing department. Others said their efforts to implement ER management had helped them win the cooperation of their IT people.
One person (sorry, don’t remember who) suggested taking a look at the case studies recently created by SAA that provided models for how colleges and universities treated specific forms of electronically-created records, such as bulletins and files related to the tenure review process. He or she thought this was a valuable model–how one kind of archives was dealing with one common record type. (I looked for these on the SAA website and couldn’t find them there–anyone got a link?) (Just added: Campus Case Studies Portal from SAA: http://archivists.org/publications/epubs/CampusCaseStudies/index.asp - thanks Erin!)
Someone else raised concerns about ER created in non-organizational settings–in other words the “personal papers” of the electronic world. What do we do about those? We can’t be out there trying to educate all potential donors now about what formats to use or how to properly manage their personal records. (Sadly, the group had no answer for this.)
Geof observed that we are all little “engines of creation,” churning out more records (or potential records) than our predecessors ever did. There’s just more crap than there used to be. (I don’t think “crap” was the word Geof used. That came from the audience.) There was support for the idea that a lot of these problems were really records problems, not specifically electronic records problems. Again, there was a theme that there was a need to get back to the basics of records management.
Geof encouraged the group to “get to love chaos”– because often the original context of electronic records is the chaos that is a user’s computer. People aren’t necessarily creating records in the kinds of series that we’ve come to expect, and that maybe we shouldn’t be trying to impose those kinds of expectations in this new environment.
He closed by calling on everyone to get out there and do something, to take a risk. He said that we have to brave enough to fail, because to do nothing at all rather than risk failure was not acceptable. The challenge presented by electronic records to archivists is “our one chance to be great,” this is where we will make our contribution–or not. “If we fail at this,” he said, “we fail at everything.”