Rethinking records management for the Web 2.0 world.

• Author: Munzer, Thomas
• Position: Managing the Crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World - Book review

Managing the Crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World

Author: Steve Bailey

Publisher: Facet Publishing, London

Publication Date: 2008

Length: 172 pages

Price: $115

ISBN: 978-1-85604-641-1

Source: www.neal-schuman.com

The latest technological wrinkle is going by the concise rubric 2.0. Sometimes more formally referred to as "Web 2.0," it is a reference to the increasing number of services being offered online without the downloading, storage, and cost of the "traditional" client/server environment. This means that, in varying degrees, an organization's information is not being kept on its own servers, but on the web--or, as some describe it, "in the clouds." This has great potential for organizations to cede some degree of control over their information to the web provider and its users.

The recent significant uptick in offerings from these providers is a difference in scale aspiring to be a difference in kind. Many vendors, including Amazon and Google, have been committed to web services for some time. The change now is that more vendors are offering a greater range and quality of these services.

For example, in Google Apps, the familiar search engine is offering the full range of Windows-like Office suite products. 2.0 offerings include web e-mail, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, collaboration tools, document sharing, and social network and categorizing sites. Some informal adoption of these capabilities by would-be "techies," as opposed to the IT department, is happening in some organizations. Records management (RM) professionals need to address the implications of this now to minimize the "catch up" position they have found themselves in during IT rollouts of yore.

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Web 2.0 and RM Challenges

In a book that will be of interest to all records managers seeking to get a handle on this technology, Steve Bailey of the British Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) confronts the questions presented by RM 2.0 and proposes principles setting out how, at this point, it might be defined.

He sees its advent providing challenges to the ability of RM--as we know it--to handle the volume and variety of information with which it should be concerned in a web environment, and asks whether RM is, in that environment, "fit for purpose." Bailey would have us rethink traditional RM practices, especially in the areas of records appraisal and retention. This rethinking is required because so much information is being...