Book review: viewing records as business objects.

• Author: Snyder, Theresa R.
• Position: Domesticating Information: Managing Documents Inside the Organization - Book review

TITLE: Domesticating Information: Managing Documents Inside the Organization

AUTHOR: Carol E.B. Choksy

PUBLISHER: The Scarecrow Press Inc.

PUBLICATION DATE: 2006

LENGTH: 250 pages

PRICE: $40

SOURCE: www.arma.org/bookstore

This book aims to move beyond the practitioners handbook to the theoretical considerations of managing records and information. To that end, author Carol E.B. Choksy attempts to provide executive management with insight into the business, process, and principles of records management and, therefore, its importance to the corporation. She also identifies academics in library and information science, archivists, and records managers as her audience. The book succeeds in engaging these latter groups, and there is still something here for the executive willing to forge through denser sections.

Choksy begins with the idea that information is ubiquitous, important, and inchoate. Nations, or at least political groups, fail when decisions are made based on insufficient information. The title of the book, Domesticating Information, is intended to reflect what people do with information--"capture it, add to it, copy it, refer to it, transmit it, retrieve it, make decisions with it, show it, describe it, organize it, study it, and manage it, among other things." The book argues the limitations of the approaches of library and information sciences, both of which focus on information as an element of culture; the former considers this in the area of museum and libraries, and the latter of scholarly collaboration and the use of information. Rather than emphasize these cultural elements, this book focuses on information as a tool with which to perform work.

In the introduction, Choksy spends some time distinguishing between a records manager, who is concerned with records as business objects, and the archivist. She likens the shock that many felt at Levi Strauss's observations of women as objects of exchange with an archivist's rejection of the idea that a record is a business object. This may be more dramatic than necessary; most archivists, though truly concerned with the collection, preservation, and provision of access to documents of culture, also appreciate that the volume of records generated for business-use only is high and that no more than roughly 5 percent of these records will be saved for the longue duree. Further, understanding that the record documents some business activity, it would be assumed that the record, then, is...