ISO15489 update 2005

 by Mike Steemson

Principal, The Caldeson Consultancy.

World domination by the recordkeeping standard ISO15489 rolls on.  In the last 18 months or so, more non-English speaking nations have translated the work and still more are studying it.  Information management training groups and consultancies world-wide have focussed on its dissemination. 

Since my last survey of the standard’s spread, published in Informaa Quarterly of August 2004, ISO 15489 has spread further and wider than almost any other international standard with the exception, perhaps, of the suite of ISO9000 quality standards.

The world’s interest is vividly illustrated by the growth of the Australia-lead ISO sub-committee that created the standard, ISO TC46 SC11 ¹.  In its pre-15489 days, from 1998 to 2001, the sub-committee, for which I was a member of the Australian delegation, consisted of only eight participating delegations from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.  Three other countries had observer status.  Now, it has participation from 22 countries ² plus 13 observer nations ³, covering six continents and including several former Soviet Bloc states.

David Moldrich

Under the long-time and founding chairmanship of Australian IM consultant David Moldrich, MRMA, the sub-committee is spreading its wings.  Last year is completed a new standard for metadata, ISO/TS 23081-1:2004  Information and documentation – Records management processes – Metadata for records — Part 1: Principles.  Now it is working on a revision of ISO15489 and on new standards for records management relationships, access frameworks and work process analysis for recordkeeping. 

SC11’s revision study of the Records Management standard has revealed a number of possible improvements and up-dates.  The committee is looking at ideas like making Part 1 more principle-focussed and directed at management executive, moving more of the “how do’s” to Part 2, the Guidance section, for closer attention by information management professionals.  Delegates are considering the effects of making the whole work more prescriptive, turning the “shoulds” into “shalls” and the “mays” into “musts”.  A lot more debate and work will come before release of the first draft standard.

Iceland’s unique version

Globally, new nations are taking strides into recordkeeping because of the current standard.  The little North Atlantic state, Iceland, for example, joined the rush and on May 1, 2005, the Icelandic Standard Institution (Staðlaráð Íslands) published its translation of the standard, ÍST ISO 15489-1:2001, Upplýsingar og skjalfesting -  skjalastjórn with Icelandic translation on the left part of the page and the English version on the right part, a unique format for the work.   One of the nation’s IM consultants, Sigmar Thormar, emailed drolly: “Icelanders don’t know much about RM but we know a lot about publishing  … The Saga nation mind you.”

In the United States, where many state legislatures have adopted the standard, the federal government has, so far, made few definite move towards adoption.  However, the American National Standards Institute and ARMA International are talking about creating a “companion” document with a US focus, and an ARMA Task Force is working on its own ISO15489 Implementation Guidelines ⁴.

The Spanish are taking a greater interest, too.  After a slow start, the state’s standards institution, Associatión Espaňola de Normalización y Certificación (AENOR), has joined SC11 and has been working on translating the standard following an invitation only conference by its Technical Committee 50 (CNT-50) at the Ministry of Culture in Madrid.  The conference entitled “Work on Norm ISO 15489:2001 Information and Documentation — Records  Management and its implantation in Spain”, comprised more than a dozen papers from AENOR, the Spanish State Archives, university moderators and private industry.  

Carlota Bustelo Ruesta

Spanish SC11 delegate and CNT-50 member Ms Carlota Bustelo Ruesta ⁵, associate director of the Madrid consultancy Inforarea, reported a problem common to a number of non-English-speaking nations: “Our main work has been the translation of both parts of 15489 in order to have it adopted as a national standard by AENOR.  We found a lot of difficulties in the translation beginning with the word ‘record’.  It doesn’t have an equivalent in Spanish and depending on the sector  …  archives, software developers, consulting  … the word has been translated in many different ways.”

However, the committee reached a consensus and published a draft.  Ms Ruesta reported wryly: “We received many comments so we have to work a lot on the selection of acceptances and rejections.  The process takes a long time and causes something of a little revolution amongst traditional archives professionals though we have no differences with records managers.  We hope to be published at the end of the year.” 

The Spanish University of Zaragosa ran a four-day, 30-hour course on the standard early in year entitled Document management. 15489 norm ISO Records Management that recommended a implement “electronic document management planned in agreement with ISO 15489.”  Some 20 other Spanish training courses have been organised in the last six months and, as a result, interest is rising in Latin America.

Baltic states neighbouring the leading RM nation, Estonia, are developing their own translations.  The Hungarian National Archives in Zagreb and the Egyptian Organisation for Standardization and Quality Control (EOS) are working on versions.  The Danish Standards authority has adopted it, and produced a translation.

In China, the government organisations are watching, but the universities are doing.  Associate Professor An Xiaomi, an archival science don at Beijing’s Renmin University School of Information Resources Management, has added to her Chinese translation with papers in English and North American journals like her recent Assessing records management in China against ISO 15489 and the implications ⁶. 

In Britain, where the standard is part of the British Standards Institution’s suite of recordkeeping publications, consultants are evangelising ISO 15489 in their courses and presentations.  Only last month, my old Records Management Society of G.B. colleague Jeff Morelli held a one-day seminar, Understanding and complying with the ISO 15489 RM standard, which the London consultancy host, TFPL, described as a “practical approach to implementing effective records management with reference to real-life case studies”.

French consultants Ambre Associates ⁷ fly the 15489 flag, too, recommending it on line, saying it “constitutes a guide for the organisation and management of archived documents of any organizations, public or private, for the benefit of internal or external customers”.

The ISO15489 bombshell

The French version of the standard, NF ISO 15489, published by the Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) in April 2002, sent shockwaves through the gentle Francophone European archival world.  Quebec National archivist Daniel Ducharme, wrote in the July edition of the Swiss Revue électronique suisse de science de l’information  (RESSI) ⁸ earlier this year: “Although it was quickly ratified by the Board of Directors of the Quebec Association of Archivists it did not arouse much other enthusiasm in Quebec and Canada.  However this was not the case in France and, more widely, in continental Europe, where diffusion of the French version had the effect of a small bomb in the medium of documentation and the file.”  He described the flurry of publications in French and English as a “rather significant promotional din”.

He could have added German, Spanish, Egyptian, Chinese, Russian, Swedish and a Babel of other languages.  The ISO15489 din is getting louder by the week.

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 Details of the work’s early stages are described in my 1999 paper ISO15489: It’s a vital number: Better remember it!  The standard’s completion is detailed in ISO15489: Set it to music. You’re gonna need it and the Technical Report development outlined in World taken by surprise: Nations agree on “how to’s”.

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Footnotes

Tags: development, ISO15489, RM, standards