The indiana University Electronic Records Project: Lessons Learned.

• Author: BANTIN, PHILIP C.

For records professionals, the decade of the 1990s will undoubtedly be remembered as a period of intense and passionate debate about a host of issues related to the role of the archivist and records management professions in managing and preserving society's documentary heritage.

Among the questions being asked: What do archivists and records managers contribute to society? What is their relationship to other information management professionals? What theories, principles, and techniques will continue to guide records professionals in their work? When one looks for the primary factors fueling this debate, two primary contributors stand out: the rapid technological changes of the last two decades and the increasing dependence of society on electronic or digital documentation (Barry 2000; Bearman 1994; Cook 1994).

Various research projects have addressed the challenges presented by electronic records. The most prominent are those devoted to developing basic requirements for recordkeeping systems (See DoD-STD-5015.2; National Archives of Australia) and to identifying documentation or metadata that must be present to create reliable and authentic records (See University of Pittsburgh 2000; National Archives of Australia; McKemmish and Acland 1999). However, few implementation projects have been designed to test any of these theories and concepts. The Indiana University (IU) Electronic Records Project is an implementation project begun five years ago. It was designed to develop a strategy and methodology for incorporating recordkeeping requirements into IU's transaction processing and information systems. The project staff has asked the following questions:

* What is the archivist/record manager's primary contribution to the management of digital objects?

* Will traditional methods of identifying, appraising, and describing records still have value in managing electronic records?

* Will archivists/records managers have to change significantly the way they do business?

* What new skills will be needed?

* What changes need to be made to transaction process systems to make them function effectively as recordkeeping systems?

* How does one insert the archives program into the process for designing, analyzing, and auditing electronic information systems on the IU campus?

* Who are an archivist's strongest allies in the management of electronic records, and which issues will resonate with these partners?

These questions, along with lessons learned in the implementation process, are addressed next.

Defining the Archivist/ Records Manager's Unique Contributions

LESSON 1: Records professionals must define their primary and unique contributions to managing digital resources. The profession must not only define itself but also articulate the mission of archives/ records management in relation to the goals and objectives of other related data and information management professionals.

Organizations collect, create, and use a wide variety of recorded documentation:

* data, or the raw facts, about the organization and its business transactions

* information, definable as "data that has been refined and organized by processing and purposeful intelligence" (Whitten and Bentley 1998)

* documents, "a grouping of formatted information objects regardless of medium or form that can be accessed and used by a person" (Sutton 1996)

* knowledge, which is defined as something more than information because it includes the expertise, logic, and reasoning developed by accomplished experts in a specific field to solve problems and make decisions (Turban 1993)

* the concept of a business record, which archivists argue is a specific and unique type of information quite different in its creation and purpose than any of these other types of recorded documentation

Archivists have identified two distinguishing characteristics of records. First, records reflect business processes or individual activities; a record is not just a collection of data but the consequence or product of an event. Of course, this concept is not new; older definitions identify records with a process or an activity. What is new is an insistence on defining more precisely and conceptually when a record is created by the business event or personal activity. The other part of the definition of a record stresses that records provide evidence of these transactions or activities. In other words, recorded documentation cannot qualify as a record unless certain evidence about the content and structure of the document and the context of its creation are present and accessible (Cox 1994; Cox 1996; Dollar 1992).

What do archivists/records managers contribute? What is their role in any partnership? The IU Archives team has defined its mission and its contribution as (1) the identification and appraisal of records generated in the context of business processes and (2) the creation of systems that capture, manage, and preserve these records.

In other words, records and recordkeeping systems are its main and primary responsibilities.

In the past few years, some archivists and records managers have argued that these professions need to become more involved in related disciplines such as information management and knowledge management. This change would be a grave mistake. Recordkeeping is what archivists and records managers do best, and few others in the data and information management community are committed to or trained in preserving reliable and authentic records. Recordkeeping is itself a full-time job, and it is archivists' and records managers' unique, though complementary, contribution to management of the institution's resources.

Partnerships

LESSON 2: Forming partnerships with other information professionals is essential.

Effective management of electronic records requires the archivist/ records manager to form partnerships with various professions (Bearman 1995). What has not been sufficiently demonstrated through experience is who the most important partners are and how these partnerships will work. Three partners at IU have been the most valuable -- decision support personnel, systems analysts, and internal auditors. Of the three, the IU Archives has had the most experience and success working with internal audit.

Why is internal audit such a useful partner for the...