Information Research Weblog

Microsoft are making sender control over emails more easily available. Records Management (Archival) interests could be compromised.

Grahame Gould has drawn my attention to some discusson on a records management list RECORDS-MANAGEMENT-UK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK, relating to the proposed British Standard on 'knowledge management'. Evidence for how much confusion there is regarding the concept is found in a statement from one Ian Brewer, a marketing manager:

"KM is more about information as an asset whereas RM is about creating a process by which you can store and retrieve information. For example, RM is simply about saying "all of our records on a specific topic are here". He adds that "a records management policy can add to an overall KM strategy".

Note that km is about "information as an asset" - now where have we heard about information being an asset to be controlled and managed in the same way as other assets? From the early days of information management of course. Just as an example, here's a title from the Proceedings of the 1984 annual conference of the ACM on The fifth generation challenge: "Treating information as an asset". 1984 you note - almost 20 years ago, and the BSI imagines it is something new?! In fact, the idea goes back to the Commission on Federal Paperwork of 1977 (which included electronic documents).

It really is astonishing, or is it? We have what appears to be a whole group of people entirely disconnected from information management or records management, who see fit to pronounce on so-called 'knowledge management' without having the slightest idea of what they are talking about. Ignorance rules these days!

Here's a site with a very cool front page. Not sure how much it relates to Information Research, but it's certainly worth having a look and a play.

Apparently the site itself is well laid out and has some good information for those interested in Records Management.

This article was posted to the RMAA (Records Management Association of Australia) listserv, with the comment "Strange to see the popular press (albeit in the US) show an interest in records management and archives issues".

An interesting site for those interested in Information Management, Content Management and Records Management is a site by Rick Barry. There is a massive amount of information on there, and personally I find it confusing to navigate, but then I also don't profess to be expert at searching the web.

I did see somewhere on there that Rick has admitted the site has expanded faster than he could keep up with to catalogue it, so hopefully he'll get time to have a look at it some time. However, don't take that as a criticism - it does have excellent information on it and is well worth wading through to find all the gems.

Ah, I was just about to give you some examples of pages on his site, but it's all in frames, so go hunting ...

Thanks to Grahame Gould for drawing attention to a Canadian government Web site with some interesting links to various documents on Web portal policies. The page gives links to other sites which cover Architecture, Focus Studies and Public Opinion Research, Case Studies, Portal Examples, Content Management, and Strategies and Implementation.

The site also includes pages on other useful information management topics such as: Classification, Thesauri and Controlled Vocabularies, Electronic Publishing, and Records & Document Management.

I don't know how many of you are interested in RM issues, but it's the area of "Information Management" in which I work, so sorry if you couldn't care less about it - skip to the next post. :-) http://www.rmaa.com.au/ is the home page for the Records Management Association of Australia and they have a listserv which you can join by going to http://listserver.cowan.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/rmaa and the archive of previous posts is found at http://listserver.cowan.edu.au/pipermail/rmaa/