Michael Steemson

A Letter from Hong Kong, July 2008:  Caldeson Principal Michael Steemson views leaky banking and public sector records security in Hong Kong, the teeming, capitalist jewel in China’s socialist crown.  It felt like being back home.  The feature was first published in the RMAA journal, iQ, November 2008, Vol 24, No 4, pp 11-13.

by Michael Steemson,

Principal, The Caldeson Consultancy

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Fleeing back to a cool Antipodean winter from a British summer fierce with political punch-ups over lost government records, we hit Hong Kong in the middle of its own heat wave.  The teeming ex-British colony is sweating in the global baking and  the radiance of “the beautiful games”, its Beijing bosses’ Olympics. 

Day three of mass heat, humidity and humanity: the South China Morning Post headlines look so familiar: “HSBC loses tape of 25,000 client calls” .  Day seven it happens again:  “Data leaks point to Immigration Department”. Talk about deja vu! 

In the decade since the British lease ran out on this, its last valuable dependency, Hong Kong has changed up with a burst of apparent fabulous fortune – new and improved public utilities, extensive land reclamation and bigger and bigger tower blocks.  How much of the new wealth is real is a matter of media and mogul conflict. 

Hong Kong flag

Other changes: The city streets are tidier because of new, swingeing HK$1,500 (AU$200) fines for littering, and feeding the feral pigeons.  The royal crests on policemen’s cap badges have been replaced by the region’s new symbol, a representation of the native hibiscus flower.  That’s also the centre of the “special administrative region’s” sad little red flag that replaced the blue ensign of British yore. 

What has not changed is more interesting.  The swarming traffic still drives on the left, unlike the rest of China.  The city’s huge, double-decker buses and crowded, dinky little wood-frame trams still rock through streets called Queensway and King’s Road to places like Stanley, Soho and Aberdeen.  There are still underground Mass Transport Railway (MTR) stations called “Admiralty” and “Prince Edward”.

British Hong Kong Persists

The Queen’s profile still appears on some coins of the realm and the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club still flourishes in Repulse Bay, the latter named after a Royal Navy battleship.  Major hospitals are still called after British royals, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and Queen Mary, some of which had had their own patient records losses earlier in the year.   And, of course, the thronging Victoria Harbour between Hong Kong Island and its huge suburb, Kowloon, is still named after another long-lived British monarch. 

So, it may not be too surprising to find the latest British disease is also there in spades:  doleful, porous data security.  News of such failings in Chinese government agencies is  rare, which makes the Post’s revelation particularly extraordinary.  Oriental bureaucrats are assuredly no better at records security than any others.  But their media control is usually watertight.

So, when one of the region’s highest-profile, private sector giants and a public sector agency both get caught with records management failures, neither of them actually their first offences this year, that’s big news for Hong Kong and its wicked stepmother, Beijing.   

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the HSBC, which with some justification calls itself “the world’s local bank”, admitted in mid-year ¹ that a security contractor had lost one of 55 digital tapes being carried from a provincial service centre to Hong Kong.   The acknowledgement that such data is still transported physically from A to HK, says a lot about the region’s historic business culture residues and paucity of 21^st C. infrastructure.

The tape contained recordings of telephone conversations with 25,000 clients.  The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language daily, reported that the calls “mostly related to credit card inquiries (and) business Internet banking for commercial banking customers”; highly sensitive material if finders could de-code it.

Golden Goose for E-Raiders

The massive HSBC bank is so commercially vital to the region that the Post got the number two boss on the Hong Kong Legislative Council’s security panel, James To Kun-Sun, to comment.  He warned that “the loss was a serious one and affected callers’ bank accounts could be at risk”.  The conversations “were usually loaded with callers’ personal data given during identity checks and could be used to act against their accounts if stolen”, Mr To said.

Beijing’s own English-speaking newspaper, China Daily, got in on the story reporting HSBC’s wide-eyed assurance that “specialised hardware and software are needed to access the recordings so the risk of date being leaked and information stolen was deemed low”.  Yeah, right!   In the digitally-savvy East, that’s a problem for the cyber-sinners? 

Both papers gleefully recalled the bank’s earlier loss of a whole computer server, containing account details of somewhere between 55,000 and 159,000 customers, depending on which bank statement to believe, when another branch was being renovated; a Midas touchstone for Internet thieves if they could get into it.  The Post said the bank “drew fierce criticism” over the breach and its Hong Kong boss later apologised.

Four days after the new HSBC breach, the Post revealed the Government agency failure: an Internet file-sharing program showing textual memos and minutes with names and other personal details on immigration offences by foreign domestic workers.  It was, said the Post, the Immigration Department’s second leak in three months. 

In the earlier leak, 27 files, most marked “confidential” had been found on the same Internet site identifying individuals, travel documentation and an internal report on mistakes made by immigration officers.  To make amends after that disclosure, the Immigration Department’s chief signed a formal undertaking with the Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner making 10 changes to the department’s security procedures.   

Following the second slip, the best answer the department could come up with was a lame “there are no signs our computer system has been hacked”. 

It all closely echoed the earlier British recordkeeping scandals that included lost digital data disks and a set of secret Ministry of Defence Iraq War intelligence papers and assessments of Al-Qaeda’s vulnerabilities left on a railway carriage seat and handed to BBC Radio by a “concerned member of the public”. 

Bromides and the Usual Suspects

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith MP

British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was questioned excitedly about those losses by Opposition MPs in the House of Commons and came up with the usual suspects and standard political bromides: middle management failings; policy reviews of data security systems. 

As if they weren’t already perfectly well set out.  The UK’s own National Archives offers extensive, fully comprehensive recordkeeping guidance and public sector rulebooks bristle with security regulations. 

The UK media joined the fun with dark suggestions of civil service security apathy; perish the thought, but probably the root cause. 

That was no comfort to records guardians, like those attending the year’s Silver Jubilee conference of the Records Management Society of Great Britain in April.  They had no doubt where the fault lies: top management ignorance, perpetrated by subordinates reluctant to rock budgeting boats and jeopardise high value work-place bonuses.

In Hong Kong, the media was soon taking the mickey, too.  South China Morning Post City columnist, Ben Kwok, discovered an HSBC subsidiary company promotion trumpeting: “At HSBC Private Bank we understand that things do change, including what looks safe today.”  Columnist Kwok gibed:  “You can say that again. We hope the advertising copywriter wasn’t trying to be funny because we doubt (the clients involved) will get the joke.” 

It will probably be a long time before anyone admits responsibility or the extent of damage in either London or Beijing although, in September, the Hong Kong Government earmarked HK$35 million (AU$5 million) to beef-up its hospital patient records security.  While worldwide chief executives continue to ignore basic records management, State and commercial secrets will continue to leach into the hands of the ungodly to the momentary embarrassment of corporation captains and monetary burden of the poor bloomin’ taxpayer/shareholder.

Mike Steemson and Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour

Endnote

 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

by Michael Steemson

Towards the end of 2003, the Americans and the Arabs were discussing and agreeing about something. It had either nothing or perhaps everything to do with their political differences.  The subject was the international records management standard, ISO15489, the world’s guide to saving, caring for and using the information that every organization, business, urban authority or national government relies on to carry out its functions.

The two nations were not, actually, talking with each other about the Standard but towards the end of the year, they both declared its colossal importance.

In the U.S.A., after lengthy, some would say tortuous examination, the National Archives and Records Administration was nailing the ISO 15489 standard to its mast. In his Strategic Directions: Guidance and Regulations, John W. Carlin, the Archivist of the United States, boldly went where the American National Standards Institute was still unwilling to go and announced:

“We will base our approach to records management on the ISO Records Management Standard 15489.”

At the same time, a critical symposium was being prepared in the United Arab Emirates port of Dubai. It was, said the President of the Arab Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives, Dr Abdulla El Reyes, to “show our full commitment towards upgrading the level of expertise in the area of archiving, traditional and electronic in the Arab world”.  The first concern of the symposium was:

“International standards (ISO 15489) attached to the organization of archives in governmental and private establishments.”

Little more than two years after its publication, the first global standard for records management, the International Standards Organization’s (ISO) 15,489^th work of standard setting has swept the world.

Written in English, it has been translated into German, French, Dutch and, by Renmin University linguists in Beijing, into Mandarin Chinese making it one of the ISO’s most successful publication since the ISO 9000 series of quality codes in the 1990’s

The new standard was published in October 2001 in two parts:

ISO 15489-1:2001 Information and documentation — Records management — Part 1: General, of 20 pages, and

ISO/TR 15489-2:2001 Information and documentation — Records management — Part 2: Guidelines, of 40 pages.

The second part, the “Guidelines”, is commonly referred to as the “Technical Report”, the meaning of the “TR” in its catalogue number[1]

The Australian Way

ISO15489 was soon accepted as the Australian Records Management standard, called AS (for Australian Standard) ISO15489, replacing the nation’s original 1996 ground-breaking guide, AS4390, on which the international code was based.  The National Archives of Australia (NAA) gave the standard  “formal endorsement”, describing it as “a high-level statement of principles and policy”. 

Then, the ISO work was issued as a British Standard, BSI ISO15489.  The British Standards Institution (BSI) also prepared a three-part “public document” (PD) guide to the standard, PD 0025 Effective records management.  The three parts are: 

Part 1: A management guide to the value of BS ISO 14589-1;

Part 2: Practical implementation of BS ISO 15489-1;

Part 3: Measuring performance in records management programmes

The French national standards authority Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) published the Standard as NF ISO 15489 Information et documentation – “Records management”.  In Germany, the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) has called it DIN ISO15489. Information und Dokumentation – Schriftgutverwaltung, while in the Netherlands the first part only has been published as NEN-ISO 15489-1:2001 nl — Informatie en documentatie; Informatie- en archiefmanagement; Deel 1: Algemeen by the Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut.

In North America, commentators have given the code a rousing reception. A Canadian consultant called it a “milestone in records management history” and the ARMA (Association of Records Managers and Administrators) International’s Standards Committee adopted a project for the “implementation of ISO15489 in the United States” which the association has fiercely championed ever since.  

But, until Archivist Carlin’s staunch support, North American national organisations have been slow to recognise it, despite the fact that Mr Carlin’s Deputy Archivist, Mr Lewis Bellardo, and the National Archives of Canada’s senior government information management project officer Ms Catherine Zongora were both members of the ISO sub-committee that created the Standard.

At the bottom of this apparent tardiness lies the North American zeal for self-sufficiency.  Both countries have done or are planning the Standards work themselves, like the U.S. Defense Department’s Design Criteria Standards for Electronic Records Management Software Applications, DoD 5015.2, of 1997 and updated in mid-2002.

In Canada, a number of provincial legislatures, notably the western prairie province of Alberta, have absorbed ISO 15489 into their information management regulation and now, the Canadian National Archives Information Management Capacity Check tool and the Canadian General Standards Board’s standard CGSB 72.34 Electronic Records as Documentary Evidence, to be published this year, have the international Standard as their bases. 

Canadian launch

The Standard was launched with colourful ceremony at the ARMA International conference in the Palais des Congrès de Montréal (the Montreal Convention Centre), Canada, before an impressive group of august world archives and records officials including Mr Bellardo, Ms Marilyn Osborne, the Director-General of the Government Records Branch at the National Archives of Canada, ARMA International President, Mr Terry Coan, and Mr David Moldrich, the ISO sub-committee’s Australian chairman.

British Keeper of Public Records, Mrs Sarah Tyacke, joined the ceremony in a live video link from a U.K. government recordkeeping conference in Stratford-on-Avon, England and welcomed the new standard.  She praised it as providing a “strategic and holistic approach to the management of records that senior managers can understand”.

Within weeks, the English-language standard was available for delivery as hard copy or on-line as an Abode Acrobat .PDF file from the ISO webstore in Geneva and from Standards Australia’s Sydney headquarters.   Other standards authorities followed with the English version and their translations. 

Three years’ hard labour

The standard had taken three years’ hard work by an ISO sub-committee, designated ISO TC46/SC11[2], with members from a world wide community including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands Sweden, the United States, the Peoples’ Republic of China and other nations.

In addition to the founding AS4390 Australian Standard, a total 317 international documents were reviewed during the series of intense, three-day conferences held in Athens, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne and Stockholm.  SC11 chairman David Moldrich told the launch audience the job could probably have been written in six months, but acceptance of the document by the world-wide community required “long discussion, much compromise, many journeys and many, many cups of coffee”.

Members of SC11, including archivists and recordkeepers most notably from Germany, France, Ireland, Sweden, Britain, Canada and the United States, got through a lot of work. I joined them at the sub-committee’s Paris meeting at the headquarters of the French standards institution, AFNOR, in the Paris suburb of La Defense, a not inappropriate location in the event.  We argued quite a lot!

ISO15489 was based on the Australian Standard, certainly, but it was not an easy passage from Wagga Wagga to the World.  At the Paris meeting, it was Australians versus the Rest as other national member bodies showed a determined antipathy for AS4390’s processes, the “Australian how-to’s” we called them.

Australian delegates, lead by Sydney consultant and world-known recordkeeping guru, Ms Barbara Reed, sat and gritted their teeth as other national group leaders complained: they didn’t necessarily disagree with the recommended procedures, but they didn’t do things like that in their countries and other nations shouldn’t be pinned down to doing it like this or that if they already had established national processes.

It was a memorable show of Australian restraint, though Barbara’s fierce doodling  –  her conference doodles should be on exhibition at the Australian National Gallery  –  reached new heights of furious complexity and colour.  Chairman David Moldrich maintained his legendary cool.

My other new colleagues, Monash University’s soft-spoken Mr Frank Upward, from Melbourne, Standards Australia’s energetic committee secretary Mr Peter Treseder from Sydney and National Archives of Australia’s thoughtful Ms Jill Caldwell among them, all kept their heads.  They harkened to their leader’s insistence that there be “no triumphalism” by the delegation. 

The Australians were not going to be accused of pushing their weight around.

It worked!

The German delegation came up with an answer.  Dr Nils Brübach, then a senior lecturer at the Archives School in Marburg, Germany, suggested confining the world standard to a statement of high-level recordkeeping principles about which there was little or no disagreement.

Then, he suggested, we could put all the “how to’s” into what ISO calls a “Technical Report (TR)”.  A TR does not have the status of a Standard, he explained, but could offer advice on processes by which the Standard users might apply its tenets.  The TR wouldn’t have to stick to just one process, either, but could offer alternatives thereby, he supposed, satisfying all comers. 

It was a statesmanlike judgement, swiftly accepted by the meeting.  You could feel the tension lift as Mr Moldrich determinedly moved us on to the mammoth task of filleting the current draft of the Standard to separate application from principle.  And we did it by the end of the meeting   — a quick and dirty cut but a start.  The Technical Report for the Records Management Standard ISO15489 was born.

I later reported to my sponsors, the then National Archives of New Zealand [3]: “Log jammed with irreconcilable views on basic management practices, the International Standards Organisation’s records management sub-committee has completely re-designed its approach and begun work on two separate documents, a standard and a technical report.  It was a bold move.  After a year’s deliberation, Sub-committee 11 has left itself just six months to complete a “committee draft” of the standard, designated ISO15489, if it is to conform to the Organisation’s new time limits for standard making.” 

My conclusion balefully exposed my lack of understanding of my fellows’ capacity for hard work.  I wrote: “I wonder if the work the committee has given itself and, in particular, Barbara Reed, who is the chief author-cum-editor of the Standard, can be completed by November.”  My doubts were unfounded.  She did it and we did it.

The second re-write

A year later, the Standard underwent a second major overhaul, this time after the internal publication to national member bodies of a draft, called the Committee Draft or CD.  Member bodies’ responses were, by and large, positive, though there was a fair amount of criticism of poor structure, woolly terminology and repetition.  A number of members complained of “inconsistencies” especially concerning metadata.  This time, it was the Canadian who came to the rescue.

The Ottawa-based SC11 group, led by the National Archives of Canada’s Catherine Zongora, went through the CD word by word and came up with a complete re-draft.  It was endorsed by Barbara Reed and the Editorial Group and agreed at the next SC11 meeting at the Berlin headquarters of the German national standards institute in May 2000. 

It improved the document enormously.  Its principals were now set out in more logical order.  Duplication had been removed and detail deleted or, in some cases, moved to the Technical Report.

The committee further re-arranged a number of clauses in the new draft and made some textual additions and amendments.  Working right up to the last minutes of the three-day schedule, SC11 approved the new format and cleared it for release as a Draft International Standard or “Diss” as its known in the industry from its acronym.

It was a very different document to the “first cut”.   The most striking changes centred round the Terms and definitions.  A number of terms were more carefully written.  Some were dropped, SC11 members considering they needed no descriptions beyond those given in contemporary dictionaries or other ISO Standards, notably ISO5127 Information and Documentation Terminology.  That’s an extraordinary document, by the way.  Almost half of it is index to the terms.  The remainder is the lexicon.

ISO15489’s new list of terms and definitions was shorter, simpler and more precise.  A number of terms like “elusive evidence” and “virtual records” were omitted, sensibly, because they no longer occurred in the Standard text.  Other terms disappear because the sub-committee considered they did not need further definition.  The phrase “records capture” was amongst these, and the term “storage”.

Some terms were extensively redefined.  “Metadata” was originally described rather too simply as “Data describing data”.  Smart, but not very informative! The new definition was more useful: “Data describing context, content and structure of records and their management through time.”

The definition of “records” became “Documents created, received, and maintained as evidence and information by an agency, organization, or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business”.  The earlier definition began with the word “information” not “documents” … another sensible change, though I have wondered if yet another definition of “record” takes us much further in understanding.

The word “document” was itself defined to link more precisely with this new “records” definition.  Instead of “structured units of recorded information, logical or physical, not fixed as records”, ISO15489 now describes a “document” as being “recorded information or object which can be treated as a unit”.  The new description makes clear it refers only to the noun “document” as opposed to the verb “to document”.

And so, the process of defining and refining the embryonic standard went on.

Recordkeeping v. Records Management

At an early stage, SC11 even stumbled over the name of the Standard.  How fundamental can you get?  The Australians wanted the Standard to refer exclusively to “Recordkeeping”, but the Americans objected.  We discovered that our concepts of “recordkeeping” and “records management” were diametrically opposed.  Personally, I use the terms synonymously, but I’m in a minority, I find. 

It appeared that in Australia, we mostly use “recordkeeping” to mean the whole process of looking after and manipulating records for an organisation’s business function, a process that involves, in part, “records management”.

In North American, conversely, the terms are used in precisely the opposite contexts  …  “records management” is the whole process, “recordkeeping” merely part of that.  This time the non-English speaking delegates sat back and watched the Anglophonic groups fight it out. 

Dr Brübach remarked laconically: ” In German, we interpret it to the same word.  Translation is always something of a modification, anyway?” 

Once again, the Australians bit their tongues and gave in gracefully, this time to the North Americans.  It was, after all, a pretty unimportant point, so long as everyone knew what we were talking about, and there wasn’t any doubt about that.  But it took us ages to weed all the references to “recordkeeping” out the documents.

International criticism

By the end of the second year’s consultation, a considerable number of different “drafts” were beginning to circulate and were being read by large numbers of recordkeeping experts outside the SC11 groups.  Some of these versions were simply rough copies, quick cuts at the huge task.  Involvement of the wider recordkeeping community was entirely planned and sort after but, inevitably, from these early rough drafts some of the experts got wrong impressions.

Some pretty high-powered personalities even went into print with stinging criticisms that boiled our blood, but in a sense served a useful purpose.  The critics drew the SC11 members together, helped clear heads of small, xenophobias and focused our purpose.

First of the barbs came from the Canadian records management icon, Professor Luciana Duranti, the fiery Italian-born head of the University of British Columbia’s Archival Studies Program School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and a leading light in the on-going InterPARES Project, the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems. 

At the end of 1999, the Professor went public with her views after seeing a copy of an early draft of the Standard. Writing in the London Records Management Journal, she berated ISO15489 from a number of angles, saying it “does not define its terms, most of which are inappropriate and inconsistently used, and recommends procedures that are badly conceived, applicable only in a few environments, simplistically and inconsistently presented and either so general as to be useless or so detailed as to be inappropriate for most contexts”. 

After seeing a later draft of the document, Luciana was somewhat mollified, but still managed a sting: She emailed me: “It seems much improved to me, apart from a certain amount of repetition.” But then added: “Generally speaking, the entire document is written as if it primarily referred to electronic records.”

Too much, too little

Quaintly, that same later draft was, during the next year, lambasted for precisely the opposite reason.  A German IT consultancy boss, Dr Ulrich Kampffmeyer, a director of the European board of the U.S-based AIIM International, criticised the Committee Draft because: “Unfortunately, this standard does not go beyond traditional writing on paper and is therefore of little or no use for electronic documentation …” His comment was published in the European edition of AIIM’s E-doc magazine that, for some reason, is the edition which circulates in Australia and New Zealand. 

However, published comments on ISO15489 were not all bad.  The US ARMA International records management group has always been a staunch supporter of the Standard and its Australian progenitor.  In a year 2000 edition of ARMA International’s Information Management Journal, contributing editor David O. Stephens, a vice president of records management consulting division of North Carolina’s Zasio Enterprises, wrote:  “It is hard to overstate the new standard’s significance.”

He said it was “probably the most significant initiative in records management today”, adding that it provided “an officially endorsed benchmarking model of best professional practices for global emulation”.  In its entire history, he said, the “records and information management discipline” had never had anything like this.

That was more like it!  SC11 was ruffled but unbowed.  We knew we were on the right track and the job went on.

Pruning the Technical Report

By the end of the Berlin meeting, we were well on track.  The Draft International Standard, the “DIS”, was complete and the Technical Report, or “Guidelines” as the document was to become known, was taking shape.  In fact, the document was taking gargantuan shape.  By now it ran to 150 pages and some 50,000 words, some of them German and some French, and including a massive nine page Bibliography of Publications from International Bodies and Institutions formulated by me  …  a true work of love!

While the Draft Standard was in the hands of national member bodies for final “yea” or “nay” approval, the committee turned its united attention to the massive TR and realised it was far too big.  The British team, lead by Australian-born Susan Healy, a records manager at the then-called Public Records Office, Britain’s national archive[4], calculated it would cost £150 a copy (around RMB1,800) at that size.

The committee was unanimous in its wish to reduce the Guideline to 50 pages and so began a slash and burn campaign that had a most surprising result.  It began with a complete re-write by the Australian national member body, orchestrated largely by Jill Caldwell.  My lovely Bibliography was reduced to a shadow, out went all the incomprehensible German and French sections, to be retained for their own language editions, of course.  The original plan to match the structure of the Standard with suitable explanations, section by section, was abandoned.  All the annexes, barring the emasculated bibliography, were dumped, somewhat unwisely in my view because they contained some useful examples of policy and planning strategies.

With the committee’s new unanimity, brought about I’m sure by that cutting criticism and the now three-year-old acquaintance with each other, came an even greater result.  Remember all that bickering about the Australian “how to’s” and the inclusion of worldwide alternative procedures?  Well, the committee now discovered that it could, after all, really only recommend one, single process for each principle. 

No one was more surprised than we were.  We realised that despite the apparent world differences in process, they were all, basically the same. We did, in fact, have two methods for one procedure, in the Strategies, design and implementation section, but decided that the variation was too little to warrant inclusion.  Amazing!  After all that sweat and tears!

As a sop to any remaining nationalistic concerns anywhere, the committee blithely agreed to suggest that, if national members bodies felt their methods deserved independent acknowledgement, they should produce their own “workbooks” to compliment the Standard and its Guidelines.  It was all over bar the shouting for the launch party at the ARMA International annual conference in Montreal, Canada.

What the fuss about?

What’s all the fuss about, then?  What has the world got with its Records Management Standard? 

In some ways it’s almost a bit of an anti-climax.  To us committed and, hopefully, knowledgeable recordkeepers, it might be a bit boring: even blindingly obvious.

Sure, ISO15489 is about records management but we already know lots about that, almost everything there is to know.  Whether that’s true or not, it misses the point entirely. 

Much more importantly, ISO15489 is the World’s Records Managers saying with one clear voice: “This is important.  This must be done.  Here’s how to do it.”

So, what does ISO15489 say?

Here is the Standard’s raison d’etre:

“The standardization of records management policies and procedures ensures that appropriate attention and protection is given to all records, and that the evidence and information they contain can be retrieved more efficiently and effectively, using standard practices and procedures.”

That’s almost the first paragraph in the book and, right up there at the top, it introduces that vital word “evidence” to business process.

It follows this up with: “Records contain information that is a valuable resource and an important business asset. A systematic approach to the management of records is essential for organizations and society to protect and preserve records as evidence of actions.  A records management system results in a source of information about business activities that can support subsequent activities and business decisions, as well as ensuring accountability to present and future stakeholders.”

That’s telling users about the Fourth Resource of Business  – Money, Product, Manpower   … and Information.  It comes in Section 4, Benefits of Records Management.  The Standard is full of such wise aphorisms.

Here’s another one: “Records management governs the practice both of records managers and of any person who creates or uses records in the course of their business activities.”

That’s the bit about everyone being a records manager, one way or another.  That’s how the Standard works. It describes, but not prescribes, in plain unequivocal language, the tenets of the profession we know and love.  You and I have heard most of it before, one way and another, but not with the backing of the whole world’s practitioners … barring, of course, the reactionaries whom we know and can judge for ourselves.

So many will benefit

The Standard runs to a modest 7,800 words and around 25 A4 pages, not a lot to show for so much hard labour.  But so many are going to benefit.

After those opening great truths, ISO15489 gets straight down to the work setting out its scope and what ISO calls “normative references” which really only amount to signposts to associated ISO standards like the ISO9000 series and that amazing ISO5127 Vocabulary, all of which the organisation hopes you will feel compelled to buy as well.

The Scope carries one of its few notions that I dislike, a footnote … and I don’t like end notes either … a footnote that makes a point of telling users that the Standard does not apply to Archives Management.  The footnote explains it thus: “In some countries, the management of records also applies to archives management. Archives management is not covered in this Standard.”

Actually, the Scope makes the point twice.  After carefully setting out the four major functions by which it seeks to “ensure that adequate records are created, captured and managed”, it shoots another hole in its foot by insisting again that it “does not include the management of archival records within archival institutions”.   

That is a mistake.  All right, I understand archives management is not just records management by another name, but why did we in SC11 make such a thing of it when, as we admit, they indeed are almost synonymous in some countries.  It was, I believe, included as a sop to those old reactionaries I spoke about who still get a sort of xenophobic prickly heat over the ceasefire slowly being brokered into peace between recordkeepers and archivists, especially in Australia. 

I suppose, in a way, it helps to defuse negative reaction from any myopic reactionaries, but I call it appeasement.

SC11 has this year begun the first stages of a revision of the standard, another long-term project that is unlikely to become public knowledge until near the end of the year.  I hope the new members will quietly dispose of this small irritant.

That apart, the Scope usefully sets out the Standard’s purpose and its intended audience:  all managers, information professionals, all other personnel in organisations and anyone with a duty to create and maintain records.

Then come the terms and definitions, a short, sweet list of just 21 words and phrases we considered either were not adequately defined elsewhere, or had some special meaning to the Standard.  They range from “access”, which we defined as the “right, opportunity or means of finding, using, or retrieving information”, to two definitions of “transfer”, one meaning a change of custody or ownership, the other just the simple movement from one location to another. 

A crib sheet for advocacy

Now comes one of the best bits of the Standard, I reckon, Section 4 Benefits of Records Management.  It’s magic!  Anyone wanting a crib sheet with which to compose a convincing argument for a proper recordkeeping regime need look no further.  It’s all there, in about 300 simple words.  We’ve heard them all before, but not so neatly and succinctly tabulated.

Just a list of the bullet point imperatives gives the taste: conduct, facilitate, provide, meet, support, protect, deliver, establish and more.  Good stuff!

A short section on what we called the “Regulatory Environment” simply jogs memories that “regulatory” means a good deal more than just abiding by the law.  And it returns to that important fundamental: “An organization should provide adequate evidence of its compliance with the regulatory environment in the records of its activities.”  

It sounds obvious when you say it now, but it’s amazing how often that gets forgotten in the excitement of new recordkeeping process.

The sixth section in the Standard gets down to some detailed and explicit guidance on Policy and Responsibilities.  An early paragraph says the records management policy “should be adopted and endorsed at the highest decision making level and promulgated throughout the organisation. Responsibility for compliance should be assigned”.

I and, I am sure, almost every speaker on recordkeeping policy has said the same thing, probably in much the same words.  But this is not just Mike Steemson saying it.  This is The World speaking!

The World speaking

The Standard has all the familiar phrases: “derived from an analysis of business activities”, “organizational environment”, “current business needs” and, once again, “need for evidence”.  It goes along with its AS4390 parentage by assigning responsibilities for recordkeeping far beyond just the professional with the title: to executives for support, to system managers for useable documentation and all employees for accurate and complete evidence of their work.

 The seventh chapter, Records Management requirements, does more than just tells us to manage records. It requires the records management policy to dictate what records are created in each business process and what information is included in them.  It wants the policy to determine the form and structure in which records and metadata are created and captured, and which technologies used.

It calls for requirements for retrieving, using and transmitting records and retention rules to satisfy those requirements. It seeks assessment of the risks through failure to keep authoritative records of activity, meet business requirements, community expectations, complying with legal and regulatory requirements, applicable standards and organisational policy.

Not satisfied with that, it wants a programme for identifying and evaluating opportunities for improving what it calls “the effectiveness, efficiency or quality of its processes, decisions, and actions that could result from better records creation or management”.

It insists: “Rules for creating and capturing records and metadata about records, should be incorporated into the procedures governing all business processes for which there is a requirement for evidence of activity.”[5]  There’s that word again  -  “evidence”.

Legal Admissibility concept

It crops up again in Chapter 8,  in a clause that is dear to my heart and one on which I rode shotgun throughout the Standard’s production.

Chapter 8 talks of compliance with all requirements arising from business, regulation and community expectation. It says with great clarity: “Records system compliance with such requirements should be regularly assessed and the records of these assessments retained for evidential purposes.”[6]

That’s what we used to call “legal admissibility”, a process that will allow us, in the event of legal challenge, to prove that our system was working properly at all times in its life.

It marks a high point in a campaign that I’ve championed since getting involved in the creation of a code for the legal admissibility of electronic records[7] with the British Standards Institution in London back in the early 1990’s.   It was a contentious subject.  Lawyers shook their heads mournfully over the odds on judges accepting these strange, new paperless documents.

But the code was written and the judges were a lot worldlier than their juniors gave them credit for.  Now, the principal of routine, regular assessment of records systems to confirm e-records’ evidential weight is picked up by world recordkeepers.  It’s a very satisfying result.

ISO 15489’s Chapter Seven deals with requirements of records while this succeeding section deals with the needs of the records system.  Superficially, they look much alike but, of course, have many differences.  It is here that the user realises what lengths the authors have gone to ensuring that the “all-paper”, “no-paper” challenges are not sustained.  The Standard concentrates on “records management strategies”, “information management strategy plans”, “records systems”, “environments” and “media”.

In fact, the Standard rarely specifies media or environment except, of course, where a process is peculiar to one.[8]  It relies on its definition of “records system” as being “information system which captures, manages and provides access to records through time” which, of course, covers any process  … paper, electronic or any other yet to be devised.

The Standard’s chapter nine, Records management processes and controls, is its largest and the one that, singly, engaged SC11 most.  Filling a third of the document’s pages, it contains all the directions for deciding which records should be kept, how long to keep them, how to look after them and how to dispose of them once their useful life is ended.

It sets out the types of documents that may be required for what is describes as “continuing retention”.  It’s a fairly long list but it really covers simply records of evidence (of actions and interactions) and rights. 

The Standard is clear about the purpose of retaining records in a system. The process establishes the links between author, record and it business purpose; links records to others and establishes their relationships.[9]  It seems blindingly obvious. Nonetheless, by saying it, the Standard identifies and secures the principles that can, perhaps, be hard to isolate and express to disinterested or disingenuous organisation executives. 

Now we are getting to the heart of what ISO15489 is good for.  It contains no new, shocking truths or dramatic recordkeeping revelations. If you are looking for eye-opener revelations, you worldly recordkeepers won’t find them here.

If anything, ISO15489 tends towards conservative approaches in deference to cultures where the concept of professional management of records is often a novelty or even a nuisance. 

A-weapon for I-managers

ISO15489 is a weapon of mass instruction in the armoury of information managers.  It adds power to the elbows of recordkeepers fighting their corner for greater support and recognition for both their systems and themselves. 

For the lucky ones with established and recognised systems, the Standard will certainly hold few surprises.  For the less-fortunate, ISO15489 offers back-up from contemporaries from all across the globe.  For the records novice, it’s a bible, a keystone, a bright light illuminating the most indistinct corners of world we know and try to love.

Which sound like the end, doesn’t it.  No, the Standard has two more chapters, my favourite, the shortest, Monitoring and auditing, and Training.  The Standard deals with these matters briefly because they involve more process than principle, but the Guidelines more than make up.

The Guidelines implement

SC11 didn’t quite make its target to contain the Guidelines in 50 pages.  It is nearer 60.  But we succeeded in one sense.  Some 15 pages comprise invaluable tables identifying complimentary sections in the two 15489 documents, the necessary and preferable corollary to our decision to end the slavish matching, section by section, of Standard format and the Guidelines’. It’s a small price to pay for ending such a cumbersome plan.

The Guidelines set out in considerable detail how to prepare a records management policy statement and how to apportion records responsibilities within an organisation.  The document offers a massive, eight-step programme for the design and implementation of a records system and 15 pages of instruction on records processes and controls from “business activity classification” to “transfer of custody or ownership of records”.

The Guidelines’ Chapter 5 Monitoring and auditing was my personal responsibility because of my interest in the legal admissibility concerns.  Not all my colleagues shared my sensitivities, but I and those who saw the need fought the good fight with the result that the chapter opens with the statement:

“There are three reasons for monitoring and auditing records systems:

• to ensure compliance with the organisation’s established standards;
• to ensure that records will be accepted as evidence in a court of law should this be required; and
• to improve an organisation’s performance.”

And it contains a sub-section, 5.3 Evidential weight, which deals with the subject in more detail and emphasises: “Records managers employing electronic information storage systems need to be aware of the potential for legal challenge if documents from such a system are presented in evidence to a court of law.”

The Guidelines contain much to help recordkeepers apply the Standard’s principles, an “implementation guide” it calls itself.[10]

Even on training, the Guidelines give precise indicators of who needs records training and why, how this may be achieved and when, and what needs to be done to maintain levels of expertise … a thorough manual!

It is, as I said, an amazing document, a condensation of the records world’s experience and expertise.  It reveals that although the world may use a variety of methods, there is an agreed “best way” to undertake the principles of good recordkeeping.  The Guidelines are, as they indicate, only a guide to the Standard and not part of it, but it is clear that the processes described will in time become the basis of all records systems, a boon for us recordkeepers all over the world.

Have no fears that you will have to be making big changes in the way you or your organisation operate recordkeeping.  The Standard and its Guidelines fit snugly within established recordkeeping cultures

Since the publication and the rising acceptance around the world, sub-committee SC11 has not been resting.  Sometime this year, it hopes to be able to complete its ISO 23081 Metadata for Records Standard, early drafts for which are in circulation for comment.

It’s another simple document, setting out the truths of metadata creation and the different times they should be added to records.

It will consist of three parts:

1. a set of technical specifications for creating, managing and using records management metadata and explanations the principles that govern them;
2. practical guidance on implementation issues and on use of existing metadata sets, and
3. an evaluation of existing metadata sets and initiatives linked to ISO 15489.

 Soon the world will have these important principles to absorb, along with those of the all-important ISO 15489.   And the world is absorbing them.  They are causing the recordkeeping revolution that SC11 delegates were hoping for.

Word across the World

Standards and archiving journals all over Europe have published articles about the standard, many written by members of SC11 in German, French, Dutch and Croatian, for the new state of Serbia, formerly a part of Yugoslavia. 

The Czech Republic has issued its own guide to ISO 15489, e-CH-0002 in German, the republic’s business language.   Central Spanish standards authorities have been slow to react to the ISO 15489, but in Barcelona, the government of the province of Catalonia last year held a seminar on the standard and has produced a version in the Catalan language.  The Catalonian Research and Information Society Department (DURSI) is developing and implementing public sector record management procedures based on the international code.

The Nordic nations have picked up the work, also.  The Swedish standards institution and records managers from its Civil Aviation Authority were foundation members of SC11.  As a result, the country’s Agency for Public Management, the Statskontoret, which guides government agency administration practice, includes it in its procedures. The little North Atlantic island nation, Iceland, once a province of Denmark, is translating the work

The former USSR satellite Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are all preparing their own language versions.  The National Archives of Estonia translated an early, 2000 draft of the developing standard into its own language (Seletuskiri ISO 15489-1:2001 tõlke kohta) and the Standard has been adopted by the new republic’s State Chancellery. 

The Estonians are now working on the final ISO Standard despite getting hung up over what some delegates of the Standards Board of Estonia’s technical committee 22, Information and Documentation, saw as inconsistencies.  But they worked their way through that and, later, Mr Tiit Arumäe, the Deputy Head of Bureau at the National Archives of Estonia, said: “The National Archives has already started to use the standard by incorporating its suggestions in guidelines to the agencies whose records management is under its supervision.”

The Lithuanian Standardisation Department expects to approve ISO 15489 as its official standard this year and has already created regulations in accordance with the international principles.

Latvian Standards’ (Latvijas standarts) Museums, Archives and Libraries Standardisation committee made the decision on February 28 to finish its work on translating the standard, despite early difficulty with some of the English words.  The translators stumbled over the international guide’s use of words like “disposition” deciding to translate it to the equivalent to “appraisal and destruction”.   “Disposition” has caused similar problems elsewhere, even in some English-speaking communities where “disposal” or “removal” are preferred.

The English word “control” was awkward for the Latvians, too.  In the former Soviet nation, the equivalent word applies more precisely to the time allotted for replying to correspondence  … not what the SC11 authors had in mind at all. 

The Baltic Connections

The Latvians hope to be able to report the job done to the second International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA 2), Archival Affinities: Adapting and Adopting Archival Cultures, at Amsterdam in September 2005.

To my Riga correspondent, it will come as a huge relief.  He emails: “Last year I was doing manly fire fighting by working out basic RM principles corresponding to requirements set out by laws and government regulations, defining responsibilities, authorities to certify copies etc, etc.”

He and his colleagues have much to do.  He writes: “Since Latvia regained its independence, the record’s only point of interest has been in the sense of it being full and accurate, capable of fulfilling its legal aims. Management issues are left for better times.”

The Irish consultancy, Eneclann, a campus company of Ireland’s big tertiary institution, Trinity College, recommends the Standard, telling clients:  “Any records management procedures implemented should aim to meet the criteria set out in ISO 15489 to ensure the best efficiency of your organisation’s record keeping.”  The Irish National Archives also backs the Standard.

In my home country, New Zealand, the national archives uses the Standard as the basis for its Government recordkeeping programme, “Continuum, create and maintain”.’

In Africa, the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa has endorsed the Standard.  The Kenyan National Archives is showing its sub-Saharan neighbours the way with its own Records and Archives Management Standard based on ISO15489 and the International Council on Archives’ standard for archives description. 

Director of Kenya Archives, Musila Musembi, tells me: “Our view is that proper and effective implementation of the ISO 15489 standard will provide reliable records keeping systems that will in turn enhance automation of records management services.”  Nonetheless, sensibly, the Kenyan’s are running a pilot project at the nation’s Ministry of Planning and National Development to test the standard’s applicability to Kenyan public sector practices.

In the Caribbean, the University of the West Indies has introduced the Standard to its administration.  The International Council on Archives plans ISO15489 implementation guidance sessions at its annual congress in Vienna, Austria, next August, headed by ARMA’s Director of Professional Resources, Diane Carlisle, the leader of the U.S. delegation to SC11.

The congress will see, for the first time, the ICA’s Workbook on Electronic Records, a document produced by its Committee on Current Records in an Electronic Environment comprising 25 members from around the world.  The workbook’s principle reference point is ISO15489.

Late last year, the second anniversary of the Standard’s publication was celebrated in Geneva, Switzerland, the home of the International Standards Organisation, with a seminar attended by more than 140 delegates from USA, Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Russia, the Balkans, Pakistan and Switzerland.

The list of participating nations grows day by day and now that it is available in Mandarin, thanks to friends at the University of Renmin lead by Associate Professor An Xiaomi, it is taking root in this vast Peoples’ Republic of China.  I am sure you will find it of immense value.

With ISO15489 in your hand, you will be able to encourage your employers with promises like: “This is how the world does records management.  We can learn from the world.”

__________________

Paper on line

 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”.

__________________

Footnotes

[1]   ISO15489 sold by the International Standards Organisation store URL: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prodsservices/ISOstore/store.html.

[2]   ISO TC46 SC11:  ISO’s Technical Committee number 46 (Information and documentation), Sub-Committee number 11 (records management).

[3]  Now called Archives New Zealand. URL: http://www.archives.govt.nz.

[4]  Now called The National Archives. URL  http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/.

[5]  ISO15489.1 Records Management, sub-section 7.1 Principles of records management programmes.

[6]  ISO15489.1 Records Management, sub-section 8.2.3 Compliance.[7]  BSI DISC PD0008: 1999, Legal Admissibility and Evidential Weight of Information Stored Electronically, British Standards Institution, London, 1999.

[8]  For example, ISO15489.1 sub-sections 8.2.2 Integrity and 9.6 Storage and Handling.

[9]  ISO15489.1 Records Management, sub-section 9.3 Records capture.

[10]  ISO TR 15489.2 Guidelines, section 1. Scope

We berthed on a mild Tuesday morning and Mother, my young brother and I craned from the deck railing for a glimpse of Father, somewhere on the busy quay below.  We didn’t call them Mother and Father in those days.  They were “Mummy” and “Daddy”, then.  I had just reach double figures in years and we were ending our assisted passage from London’s Tilbury Docks, a huge adventure and six long weeks away.

Back then, I had watched the white cliffs of Dover slip past in a late Northern summer morning’s heat haze without a qualm.  We had palled-up with another little boy who took some of our Dinky Toys and lead soldiers.  My brother and I crept into his mother’s cabin to steal them back and we were inseparable after that.  Our mothers called us the Three Musketeers.

We had watched open-air movies in the silken Indian Ocean darkness and shrieked delightedly at the young men sporting in the ship’s Crossing the Line ceremony.  After a heavy tropical hailstorm smothered the ship in short-lived ice, we had pushed each other around the decks in a box, like we had done in snowbound Hampshire fields months before.

My brother and I slept in a dormitory deep in the ship, below the waterline and several decks away from the four-berth cabin Mother shared with other migrant wives.  We usually slept soundly, despite the throb of the ship’s screws just below our feet, but others were less comfortable.  In the tropics heat, the immigrant in the bunk below mine, a young Englishman just old enough to have been fighting in Europe the year before, went stir crazy.

The stir crazy Englishman

Mystifyingly one morning, he had asked me, a timid 10-year-old who never played with fire, if I had any matches.  Later he tried to set light to his foam mattress, put on his life jacket and jumped over board.  Someone threw a life buoy with a flare and the ship turned to find him floating on his back as if he was in the shallows on Brighton beach, unconcerned at the prospect of sharks or that the nearest landfall was beyond the horizon.

For the rest of the journey, he was kept apart.  We used to see him exercising on a remote deck under the eye of a crewman.  I thing he was put ashore at the following port of call, Melbourne – another sorry bundle of invisible war wounds hopefully cured by Australian sun and sangfroid

Father was already in New Zealand after demob.  He’d “discovered” the country and its unimaginably fertile Bay of Plenty orchards while on leave from service in the Pacific region.  After a career in the Royal Navy during two World Wars, he finally wanted to follow his father and get back to the soil, not in dour, rationed, battered Britain but in this clean, quiet, comfortable land flowing with unlimited butter and sunshine.

Mother had agreed despite ludicrous and firmly-believed English folk-tales that the distant Dominion swarmed with unruly, barefoot children all with soft, chalky teeth caused by neglect and “bad water”, whatever that meant.

Mother saw Father first and we all waved frantically, although I didn’t actually spot him until he was striding up the gangway to join us on board.  I was shocked at his white hair, made starker by his heavily tanned face, and was conscious of their awkwardness together after more than two years’ separation.  We had to wait what seemed an age for our huge, wood and brass-bound trunks to be cleared in the echoing Customs shed, but finally we were free to make our way to Wellington railway station and the Express train north.

The carriages seemed cramped and quaint – no corridors and compartments like the trains we had taken to blitzed London when Father worked there at the Admiralty or to Nottinghamshire to spend our Summer or Christmas holidays with Grandfather.  This one had a centre aisle and hard-upholstered seats with backs that could be swung over to face the other way.  Stranger still, the train and its magnificent, snorting steam engine  – at least that was familiar  – made interminable stops at long, wooden railway stations where everyone crowded into noisy cafes for mouth-scorching meat pies and tarry tea in heavy white cups emblazoned with mysterious “NZR” monograms.  It was bewildering and exciting.

Fizzy drink frustrations

New home, sweet home.

At one such stop, perhaps it was Taihape¹, or maybe Taumaranui², my brother persuaded Father, still fond with relief at our safe arrival, to buy him a crown-capped bottle of livid red fizzy drink, called “Raspberry” with great unkindness to that noble fruit.  Back in the train, Father could not get the cap off the bottle.  We didn’t yet know about the ubiquitous bottle openers fitted by a thoughtful New Zealand Railways on the compartment wall at the end of all the carriages.

Father was stumped and I suppose about to give up when salvation came.  Across the aisle, sat a big Maori chap who had been grinning cheerfully at us excited, chattering kids and our funny Pommie accents.  Seeing our difficulty, the kindly man leant across the aisle and took the bottle from Father saying he’d open it.  To Mother’s unimaginable horror and my admiring wonderment, he put the bottle to his mouth and flipped the top off in his teeth!  So much for soft and chalky!  We never heard more of that idea.

Oddly, my brother remembers nothing of this dramatic moment.  All he recalls of the journey is that the raspberryade made him sick!

Mother was right about one thing, though.  Once we settled in our tin-roofed cottage in No 3 Road, Te Puke, and Father began learning citrus farming, we realised that the kids indeed went barefooted everywhere except to school, and sometimes even there.  Very quickly, my brother and I followed suit and our feet grew wide, tanned and leather-soled in next to no time.  But Mother always made us put on shoes when we went to town, despite our protests.  There were not to be any poor, barefoot urchins in her family, God bless her!

______________________

• Broadcast as “A Kiwi surprise” on Radio New Zealand’s National Radio programme “Sounds Historical”, hosted by oral-historian and broadcaster Jim Stevens, on Sunday, January 16, 2000, read by RNZ producer Steve Danby

______________________

Footnotes

by Michael Steemson

The international records management standard, ISO15489, has taken the recordkeeping world by storm.  In mid-2002, a Mandarin Chinese translation joined the world versions of the document, making the guide one of the ISO’s most successful since publication of its 9000 series of quality codes in the 1990’s

Concurrently, ISO15489 was accepted as the new Australian Records Management standard, called AS ISO15489, replacing the nation’s original 1996 ground-breaking guide, AS4390, on which the international code was itself based.  Then, the National Archives of Australia adopted the standard as its recordkeeping benchmark.

The ISO work has also been issued as a British Standard, BSI ISO15489, and translated into Dutch, German and French.  In North America, commentators have given the code a rousing reception. A Canadian consultant called it a “milestone in records management history” and ARMA International’s Standards Committee has adopted a project for the “implementation of ISO15489 in the United States”.  

The new standard was published in October 2001 in two parts:

ISO 15489-1:2001 Information and documentation — Records management — Part 1: General, of 20 pages, and

• ISO/TR 15489-2:2001Information and documentation — Records management — Part 2: Guidelines, of 40 pages.

The second part, the “Guidelines”, is commonly referred to as the “Technical Report”, the meaning of the “TR” in its catalogue number.

Canadian launch

 The standard was launched with colourful ceremony at the ARMA International conference in the Palais des Congrès de Montréal (the Montreal Convention Centre), Canada, on October 3, 2001, before an impressive group of august world archives and records officials including U.S. Deputy Archivist Lew Bellardo, Marilyn Osborne, the Director-General of the Government Records Branch at the National Archives of Canada, ARMA International President, Terry Coan, and Australian consultant David Moldrich, the ISO authoring committee chairman.

British Keeper of Public Records, Sarah Tyacke, joined the ceremony in a live video link from a U.K. government recordkeeping conference in Stratford-on-Avon, England, and welcomed the new standard.  She praised it as providing a “strategic and holistic approach to the management of records that senior managers can understand”.

Within weeks, the English-language standard and guidelines were available for delivery as hard copy or on-line as Abode Acrobat .PDF files from the ISO webstore in Geneva[1] and from Standards Australia’s Sydney headquarters[2].   Other standards authorities followed with the English version and translations. 

Three years’ hard labour

The standard had taken three years hard work by an ISO sub committee, designated TC46 SC11[3], with members from a world wide community including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States and other nations.

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”.

In addition to the founding AS4390 Australian Standard, a total 317 international documents were reviewed by SC11 at intense, three-day conferences held in Athens, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne and Stockholm.  Chairman David Moldrich told the launch audience the writing job could probably have been done in six months but acceptance of the document by the world-wide community required “long discussion, much compromise, many journeys and many, many cups of coffee”.

And it worked!  Conference delegate Lynne Bower, an information management worker with the Sussex Rural Community Council, in the south of England, overheard a German visitor at the launch saying that ISO15489 “will have considerable impact  …  it will provide a solid base on which to build”.  And a Swede thought it would “give those fumbling in the dark something to hang onto and follow”.[4]

New Australian standard

Nations are adopting the standard and turning it into their own, but Australia has taken it further to heart than many other communities.   A week after the Montreal launch, Australian recordkeepers held their own introduction conference in Melbourne.  Then, in April 2002, just six years after publication of its original, world-beating AS4390 standard, Standards Australia released its new code, designated AS ISO15489. 

Costing more than twice its predecessor, it nonetheless under-cut the International Standards Organisation’s version by almost two-thirds. It differed from the ISO guide only by the addition of a preface explaining Australian terminological variations like “recordkeeping systems” for “records systems” and  ”disposal” for “disposition”.

Three months later, the National Archives of Australia (NAA) gave the standard  “formal endorsement”, describing it as “a high-level statement of principles and policy”.  The NAA Director for Recordkeeping Standards and Policy, Adrian Cunningham, announced: “In conjunction with the formal endorsement, the Archives is progressively updating its standards, guidelines, training courses and other recordkeeping products to acknowledge the new Standard. As with AS 4390 before it, AS ISO 15489 provides the essential conceptual foundation for the Archives’ e-permanence suite of best practice recordkeeping standards, policies and guidelines.”[5]

Standards Australia had withdrawn the original standard, with its useful policy and procedure models, to the annoyance of some Australian users aware of those guides and mindful of AS4390’s place in the history of recordkeeping history as the world’s first modern records management standard.

The missing guides include the Storage Requirements Assessment Checklist, an example of a Storage Requirements Assessment Worksheet, Contents of a Model Disaster Response Plan, and Environmental Conditions and Safety Standards for the Storage of Records in the Australian Government, all from AS 4390 Part 6: Storage.  AS ISO 15489 covers storage requirements, but in less detail than AS 4390.

Standards Australia’s Committee on Records Management, IT-021, is currently examining these to determine whether they should be retained in some other form. Standards Australia has set up a Technical Committee on Records Management Compliance, IT-021-5, to develop a companion document to the new standard to provide practical measures for monitoring and auditing compliance. The “compliance standard” should be available in 2003.

Chinese Initiatives

The Mandarin Chinese translation was written by a member of the teaching staff at the Archives College of Beijing’s Renmin University of China, Associate Professor Dr An Xiaomi[6], and one of her Masters degree students, Ms Hourian Jiao.

Dr An said later: “We began the work after we bought it from our Standards Bureau, it took us about three months to finish the translations. It is now nationally promoted through a national magazine.  I have used the standard for teaching the course, Scientific and Technical Records and their Management, and for guiding my MA students, five of whose theses will deal with issues concerning the implications and implementations of ISO 15489 and the quality accreditation of records and records management in the environment of business, construction, foreign companies, etc.”

Dr An, who gained a PhD in archival studies at the Liverpool University Centre for Archival Studies (LUCAS), England, last year, plans a book, Best Practice Standards for Managing Urban Development Records and Quality Accreditation, based on ISO15489.

The British way

The British have done much the same as Australia. The British Standards Institution (BSI) has published the standard as BSI ISO15489.  It has been selling well.   It has already prepared a three-part “public document” (PD) guide to the standard, PD 0025 Effective records management. [7]  The three parts, the last of which was due for publication during the Northern Summer, are: 

• Part 1: A management guide to the value of BS ISO 14589-1;
• Part 2: Practical implementation of BS ISO 15489-1;
• Part 3: Measuring performance in records management programmes

United States of America

North American commentators have given the code a rousing reception.  In a 2001 edition of the ARMA International’s Information Management Journal, Canadian consultant, James C. Connelly, director of Connelly Consulting in St Albert, Alberta, called it “truly a milestone in records management history”.[8]

And U.S. Zasio Enterprises vice-president, David O. Stephens, wrote: “Those who have labored mightily for so long to make it a reality deserve undying admiration and gratitude.”[9]

ARMA International and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) lead the U.S. delegation of the SC11 committee.  In mid-2002, ARMA’s Standards Committee launched a project for the “implementation of ISO15489 in the United States”, part of a new drive for greater awareness of RM standards and guidelines in the republic.  

German project

The German standards authority, DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung)[10], was due to publish a German language edition, DIN ISO15489-1. Information und Dokumentation – Schriftgutverwaltung (Records Management) – Teil 1: Allgemeines in July 2002. The translators lead by Dr Michael Wettengel, head of electronic archives, Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives), and Dr Nils Brübach, Senior Lecturer, Archivschule, Marburg University, were working on the Guidelines ISO/TR 15489-2. Information und Dokumentation – Schriftgutverwaltung – Teil 2: Richtlinien (Guidelines).

French version

The French AFNOR[11] (Association Française de Normalisation), has published it in French. The standard is described as NF ISO 15489-1. Information et documentation – “Records management” – Partie 1: principes directeurs and the Technical Report becomes FD ISO/TR 15489-2. Information et documentation – “Records management” – Partie 2: guide pratique.  Both French and English versions are available on-line from AFNOR in hard copy or electronic formats.

Netherlands translation

The Netherlands institute, NEN (Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut)[12], has produced a Dutch translation called NEN-ISO 15489-1:2001 nl — Informatie en documentatie; Informatie- en archiefmanagement; Deel 1: Algemeen.  Dutch Government archivist and records manager Hans Hofman translated the work.

_____________

 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”.

_____________

Footnotes 

ISO Webstore, Geneva: http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/ISOstore/store.html.

Standards Australia: http://www.standards.com.au.

ISO TC46 SC11:  ISO’s Technical Committee number 46 (Information and documentation), Sub-Committee number 11 (records management).

Bower, Lynne. “ARMA 2001: An information odyssey”, Records Management Bulletin. Issue 105, pp 19-23, 40. (Records Management Society, London, December 2001). Email: lynne.bower@srcc.org.uk .

National Archives of Australia endorsement details, see Archives Advice 58

Dr An Xiaomi, Associate professor, Archives College, University of Renmin, Beijing, China.

British Standards Institution standard and PD details: http://www.bsi-global.com/DISC/Working+Withyou/busprocs.xalter

Connelly, James C., “The New International Records Management Standard: its content and how it can be used”, Information Management Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp 26-36. (ARMA International, Kansas, July 2001). Email: jim@cccrecords.com.

Stephens, David O., “The World’s First International Records Management Standard”, Information Management Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp 68-70. (ARMA International, Kansas, July 2001).

Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN).  German federal standards authority. URL: http://www2.din.de/.

Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR ).  French national standards authority. URL: http://www.afnor.fr/Portail/portail.asp.

Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut (NEN).  The Dutch national standards authority.  URL: http://www.nni.nl/. 

Dr An Xiaomi

by Dr An Xiaomi

Abstract

The appraisal of architectural archives in China is in accordance with the Archives Law and archival theories of China.  However, the application of the general rules for the selection of architectural records has had successes and failures.  Firstly, this paper describes the meanings of the archives and architectural archives in China and the general principles of appraisal, then it analyses approaches and criteria for the appraisal of architectural archives in China.  Finally, it analyses the challenges, problems and research for the future, and is critical of some current archives practices in the People’s Republic.  The analysis is based on national standards and regulations in relation to documentation plans and retention schedules of architectural archives for two types of settings, the architectural archives of creating units and urban development archives (U.D.A.) which holds both public and private records.

________________

1.0   Background

Throughout the ages and in different countries there have been different definitions for words so, in order to better understand the way of thinking of Chinese archivists, the paper starts by defining the meaning of archives, the general principles of appraisal and the context of architectural archives appraisal.

1.1   Archives in Law

The term “archives” is legalized and standardized in The Archives Law of People’s Republic of China: “Archives are historical recordings created directly in the performance of political, ministry, economic, scientific, technical, cultural, religious, or other activities by past and present official agencies, social organizations and individuals, which have preserved values for the country and society, and the term is applied to all physical forms of records, whether textual documents; pictorial documents; sound documents, etc.”¹

According to the Law, ‘preserved value’ refers to the historical value of records to the country and society.  It does not matter whether the records were created by government activities or private activities, if they are “ archival” they must be protected in the public domain.

It is worth mentioning that archives in China cover a very broad context.  They can be any type of records that have ‘preserved values’ no matter whether they are current, semi-current or non-current or that the preserved value is short-term (less than 15 years), long-term (16 -50 years) or permanent (over 50 years).²

Archives are held in two kinds of custodial settings, Danganshi and Danganguan.  In theory, the former is the internal service of a records creating unit like a records management service or institutional repository.  The Danganguan is an external service and a permanent place for the custody of archives as both an institutional and a collecting repository.³  However, in the real world, the nature and functions of Danganshi and Danganguan are more complicated than that.

1.2   General Principles of Appraisal

Appraisal refers to “activities that decide whether archival records should be preserved and how long they should be kept, based on their values.”⁴  The objectives of archival appraisal in China are for three-fold:

• Safeguarding the values;
• Guaranteeing holdings quality; and
• Achieving maximum safeguarding efficiency with the minimum of cost and labour.

These are particularly significant during preparations for digitisation and microfilming, and in the allocation of space and resources, as well⁵.

The organisation of the appraisal in China is in accordance with the Archives Law.  According to the Act’s Article 15, it is forbidden to eliminate archives without permission from government authorities.  The State archival administrative agencies are the government authorities for appraisal policies.  No organisation except these have the power to stipulate principles of appraisal; to decide the values of records for preserving; to make standards of retention schedules, or determine procedures and measures for disposal.

The processes of archives appraisal in China come in two stages.  Stage One is the “filing appraisal” undertaken at the completion of transactions after the creation of records.  The objectives of appraisal are to select the archives from these records.  At first, records are appraised to see whether they have values for preservation.  Only the records that have preserved value should be kept.  Others without should be eliminated.  Next, records of preserved value are classified into different retention periods in accordance with the national appraisal policies.  Finally, they are grouped into files as archives.

The second stage, done separately in both the Danganshi and Danganguan, is  “managing appraisal”.  This happens in the process of archives custody and management after filing appraisal.  As a rule, archives of long-term and permanent value are transferred to different types of repositories according to their provenance.

The objectives of managing appraisal are to select expired archives from preserved archives as a review and revision of former appraisal decisions.  In theory, filing appraisal is only done once in the life of records, while managing appraisal may happen many times.  However, in the real world, managing appraisal is seldom as simple as this.

To sum up, general principles of archival appraisal in China are in accordance with archival legislation in China.  They provide guidelines for what archivists ought or ought not to do.

1.3  Meaning of the Architectural Archives

URBAN ARCHITECTURE, Shanghai: The 460m-high World Financial Centre, built 2004

“Architectural archives” has both a broad and a narrow meaning in China.  While in the custody of the creating agency, the Danganshi, they normally consist of “archives created about activities in undertaking construction of buildings, bridges, roads, etc.” ⁶.  But this broadens significantly when in the custody of the Danganguan to include archives of the whole built environment, recording and reflecting the activities of architects, building construction, design, planning, the entire processes and procedures of the making and shaping of the built environment.

Though the appraisal of architectural archives in China follows these general principles, their application in the real world varies from place to place.  Architectural archives are called by different names by different people.  For example, building records kept by a planning administration would be called planning administrative archives.  But, kept by an architectural institution, they would be called architectural design archives.  If kept by a construction corporation they would be called construction archives; if by a property developer, capital construction archives; by a property owner, real estate archives or property archives.  A city archival repository, either municipal or specialist, would call them urban development archives.  From the huge variety of names, we can observe that architectural archives can have different values for different people and are held in different places for different purposes.

As a rule, the activities of architecture archives appraisal take place in two types of settings in China.  These are the architectural archives of a creating unit and the urban development archives (UDA) of a city.  Since the 1980’s, UDAs have been established in most Chinese cities ⁷.  From 1984 to 1996, the number of UDAs increased from 112 to 500.  By the end of 1996, out of 666 cities⁸, around 500 UDAs were established, representing 75% of cities.  All large⁹ and medium-sized cities¹⁰ now have established UDAs¹¹.

To sum up, the meaning of architectural archives in this paper means archives recording and reflecting professional functional activities, processes and procedures of constructing a built environment object.  This paper focuses on national strategies for the appraisal of architectural archives in the two types of archival settings, the Danganshi and the Danganguang.

2.0   Architectural archives appraisal methodology

Appraisal of architectural archives has its own features, as far as the implementation of general appraisal rules to content is concerned.  Though different archival custodians have different objectives in acquisition and selection, they are in accord over the national rules on retention.  The custodians have similar approaches to appraisal and have common tools and criteria for selection.

2.1   Rules on Retention

Generally speaking, there are two national regulations in relation to the retention of architectural archives.

Regulation 1. “Provisional Regulation on Capital Construction Project Archival Materials”¹².

This regulation was issued in 1988 by the State Archives Bureau and National Planning Committee as part of the national archival administration standards.  It serves as a documentation plan, an acquisition policy and retention standard for Danganshi custodians for developers, construction enterprises, design institutions, planning and land government authorities and built environment owners.  The regulation makes it clear that creating agencies and organizations should be responsible for filing appraisal.  According to this rule, construction project archives should be kept at least as long as the building exists.

According to Retention Schedule and Filing Scopes of Capital Construction Project Archives (Appendix, Regulation 2), different creating units have different responsibilities for construction project archives, and have different retention objectives.

Developer: Archives that have reference values for the use and maintenance of buildings should reflect the provenance of a project, the possibilities, design basis, project management, preparations for use, structures, appearance and the quality of the construction activities, the financial management of the project, etc.

Construction Enterprise.  Archives that have evidential values for the construction unit should provide evidence for the proof and analysis of the quality of construction products and the development of construction processes, they would have significance for safeguarding the identity and legal rights of the enterprise.  They would be of assistance for investment and management.  They would record and reflect levels of construction technology, techniques and management.

Design Institution.  Archives that have evidential values for the quality of design and have reference values for the future design should reflect the provenance of the design tasks, basic materials and calculations of the design, and evaluations of each stage of the design.

Government Authority.  Archives of authorised project applications, planning missions, preliminary designs and the organization of examination and checking for the completed project.

The aims of the retention are to meet the needs of creating units, the objectives of retention are functional activities that have evidential and reference values for its creators and creating units.  The analysis of appraisal is subject (the creators including agency, organization or individual)-function oriented.

Regulation 2. “Provisional Regulation on Retention Schedule of Urban and Rural Archives”¹³.

URBAN ARCHITECTURE, Beijing: Crossroads between East and West. Capital city's massive arterial road system.

This regulation issued the same year by the former Ministry of Urban and Rural Environmental Protection has been widely applied by UDAs since then as part of the national urban development professional administration standards.  It has played many roles in Chinese archival practice.  It works as a national UDA documentation plan for a city, a national archival acquisition policy and a retention standard for UDAs.  This is particularly reflected in Articles 9 to 95 of the regulation which identify 14 professional activities that have to be documented for permanent preservation and should be given centralized custody in UDAs.  They include survey, planning, management, engineering research and design archives, in addition to holdings of pubic utility, sanitation, historic places and audio-video records.

1.      Urban Survey Archives e.g. hydro-geological archives, hydrologic archives, meteorological archives, earthquake archives, engineering geological archives, mineral geological archives, place name archives, etc.

2.      Urban and Rural Fundamental Reference Materials, e.g. urban and rural economical, population, earthquake, historical evolution of urban and rural, etc.

3.      Urban Planning Archives, e.g. overall planning, detailed planning, project planning, etc.

4.      Urban and Rural Management Archives e.g. laws, regulations and policies, land use, building permission, real and estate, etc.

5.      Municipal Engineering Project Archives, e.g. main roads, ancient and permanent bridges, channels, drainage works, flood proof works, important culvert, etc.

6.      Urban and Rural Public Utilities Project Archives, e.g. public transportation, electricity, telecommunication, etc.

7.      Environmental Sanitation Management Archives, e.g. sanitation administration, large and middle scale sanitation project, etc.

8.      Transportation Facilities Project Archives, e.g. railway, waterway, highway, airway, etc.

9.      Industry Project Archives, e.g. above ground and underground pipelines, important industry buildings, electricity factories, urban and rural industry projects, etc.

10. Civil Engineering Project Archives, e.g. representative buildings of different historical periods, buildings of advanced, new or complex technology, high buildings, buildings of historical significance, buildings of importance to citizen’s life, buildings of particular style or structure, buildings of large scale, buildings of importance such as foreign embassy, overseas Chinese.

11. Archives of Urban and Rural Historical Places of Interesting and Gardens and Green Woods, e.g. memorial buildings, list of historical buildings, urban and rural statues, as-built drawings of gardens, etc.

12. Research Archives of Urban and Rural Physical Development e.g. plans of research, achievements of important research, works, academic thesis and manuscripts of importance, civil air defence archives and ministry engineering project archives, etc.

13. Urban and Rural Buildings Design Archives e.g. engineering design with advanced technology, representatives of typical project, standards of buildings, designs of universal project, key project and large-scale project, base maps and records of general project

14. Urban and Rural Audio-video Materials e.g. important meetings, the old and new appearance of the urban and rural, the construction process of key projects and large-scale projects, disasters, historical places of interesting, memorial buildings, ancient buildings, gardens, etc.

The objectives of UDA retention are the preservation of records of professional activities that have national importance and social significance for the making of the built environment of a city.  The analysis of the appraisal is object (project or product or purpose of the functions and activities)-function oriented.

The two national regulations represent different documentation plans for different archival custodians.  One is for archives creating units that are involved in filing appraisal and retention scheduling of architectural records.  The other is for specialist repositories that are involved in managing appraisal and permanent archival preservation.  They are administered by different archival administrative authorities.  They have different concerns over the purpose of archival custody and the former is subject-function oriented while the later requires object-function.

2.2   Tools for Selection

It can be shown that the principal processes used by Chinese archivists in architectural archives appraisal are their approach to and criteria for selection.

1.  Approaches to selection

Irrespective of the archival settings, approaches to identifying and selecting architectural records of preserved value are the same all over China.  They could be represented as direct appraisal, which refers to the analysis of values of archives based on direct examination of the records content item by item.¹⁴ This approach provides three key advantages:

First, the value of a complete set of project archives for a built object should be the basis for value analysis.

Second, the file can be used as a unit for preservation, selection and retention.

Third, direct examination of the content of archives is the key device for value analysis.

2.   Criteria for selection

There are quite a number of criteria that have been used by different archival custodians and by different archival administrators.  In short, they are:

Object analysis.  Here “object” refers to an aim, a purpose or a thing behind the functions, activities and transactions that creates records.  As a rule, object analysis is based on the analysis of the important key features of an object, its usefulness, its levels of importance, its type and period, and its life span.

(1)   Usefulness refers to the use of archives for present or future, the use of archives for the creating unit and the society, the use of archives for administrative, legal, historical, information, technical, cultural and knowledge reference.

(2)   Levels of importance refer to the importance of archives to the country, to the city, to creating agency, institution and enterprise, to the use of buildings and to the public interest.

(3)   Type and period refers to examples in archives from different and typical periods of time, from different political, economical, technical, cultural, social, personal significance, from different styles, innovation and pro-types, controversial items, list buildings, priorities of public interest.

(4)   Life of the object refers to life-length of fixed assets, the economic life-length and technical life-length of the object for existence.  Object analysis looks functional purposes as the provenance; archives of the same object should be looked as an integrated body to be a fond or series.  It emphasises on the values of archives for the continuity of the built environment.  This criterion is widely used in documenting engineering project activities and recordkeeping of engineering project archives in UDAs and making their retention schedules.

Subject analysis.  Here subject refers to a creating agency, organisation or individual that create records.  Subject analysis is based on the classification by creators according to the project’s social significance and relationships in accordance with traditional archival theory.  It emphasises that archives of a creator should be looked as an integrated body to be a fond and could not be separated.  Further, the first priority of values consideration and selection is the needs of a creator.  This is more often used for retention schedules and acquisition plans of architectural archives in creating units and historical Danganguan.

URBAN ARCHITECTURE, Shanxi: Traditional suburban architecture of Pingyao, Shanxi province.

Functional analysis.  This refers to analysis of the importance of social functions and functional activities that create the records.  Functional analysis is widely used in conjunction with object and subject analyses in the making of national documentation plans and archival retention policies.  Both Regulation 1 and Regulation 2 use this criterion.

Content analysis.   The analysis of the significance of the subjects or topics documented in the records that determines the usefulness, authenticity & reliability of the information.  Such an analysis is often done by thorough, item-by-item examination by file managers or archivists.  The quality of file managers and archivists determines the interpretations of the meaning of the records and determines the existence or elimination of the records.  Content analysis is fundamental to the intellectual control of architectural archives in all types of archival settings, such as the work of acquiring, organizing, retrieving, distributing and maintaining records of continuing values.  It is always content analysis that determines the quality of archives to be accessible and understandable.

Use analysis.  Analysis of the potential uses, the social and economic benefits of archival utilisation that are likely to be made of records.  Architectural archives have many uses and can be analysed from different needs of uses.  Different custodians have different concerns in relation to their user interest groups.  As a rule, it is use analysis that makes the difference between archival institutions’ collection policies and holdings structures.

Time analysis.  The values of architectural records should be seen as the history of the times.  For instance, typical and representative records from different periods should be documented.  Rare records from project creation periods are forbidden to be destroyed.  As a rule, it is the time analysis that decides the historical value of records and determines the life span of the records.

Physical status analysis.  Analysis of the media, formats and means of recording that make up the records, the conditions for their use and the maintenance of their quality and durability.  As a rule, physical status analysis is the basis for cost-benefit analysis; it often determines the value and the main features of holdings.  Generally speaking, architectural archives contain records in a wide variety of physical condition.  Their analysis provides the foundation for access by users.

Cost-benefit analysis.  The value of information in a record measured against the cost of its preservation.  This is seldom used in Chinese archival practice since there is no clear and concrete measurement available for its operation.

In conclusion, the appraisal of architectural archives in Chinese archival practice is under the guidance of the two national policies that provide national strategies¹⁵ for documenting what should be preserved and how long it should be kept.  There are a variety of criteria used by different archival custodians for different archival purposes.

3.0   Architectural Archives Appraisal Issues

In Part Three, I examine the appraisal of architectural archives in terms of its challenges and problems, and its future.

3.1   Challenges

There are two major challenges that Chinese archivists are facing today in relation to the appraisal of architectural records.

First, the expansion of architectural archives and the pressures this has put on intellectual control and access.  Since the 1980’s, the development of urban construction in China has advanced at high speed.  Urban development activity has increased hugely, as has the number of the architectural archives.  This expansion has brought great challenges to the archives of creating units and UDAs.  Serious duplications and overlap of holdings have occurred, including overlaps within archival repositories, within fonds of archival repositories, within files of archival fonds, and between Danganguan and Danganshi.

The disparity between the quantity required for effective use and the quantity of archives in existence are obvious.  The quality of archived material goes down, management costs increase and important and permanent archives are not well preserved.  As a result, progress in scientific management of architectural archives is disrupted.  The disparity has reduced effective access and use of architectural archives and has influenced the effective use of limited resources on, for example, personal, finance and materials for management.

Second, the new media and formats and the challenges they bring to the physical control of archives and their access over time.  From the 1990’s, computers have become much used in offices.  Design and geographical software has been widely used in planning bureaus, design institutions and construction enterprises.  Records and documentation of architectural activities are more and more in electronic forms created in multi-media electronic information systems.

The combined problems of immense volume, unstable storage media, and obsolete software and hardware add up to some very tough problems for Chinese archivists to deal with.

At present, the majority of the Chinese UDAs and the architectural archives of creating units have no particular strategies for electronic records and digital archives¹⁶.  In some institutions, two sets of architectural archives are kept, one in paper form, the other electronically.  Such a strategy does not solve the problem of rapid obsolescence of technology but brings heavy burdens for archivists who look after increasingly immense quantities of architectural archives in a variety of physical conditions and an information over load.

3.2   Roots of the Problem

URBAN ARCHITECTURE, Guangzhou: Ancient southern "Flower City" Guangzhou's new suburb, Tianhe

There are several factors that cause these problems.  The roots of the problem can be classified in terms of external and internal factors.

By external factors, I refer to social, historical and political factors that have influenced appraisal practice such as historical event, traditions, government policies, etc.  The following variables have impacted on these appraisal problems:

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, because of the Cultural Revolution, many architectural archives were destroyed.  Architectural archives before the 1980’s are, as a result, rare in historical Danganguans and UDAs.  Archivists today are extremely cautious over the issue of appraisal.  They do not want to be held accountable for any problems caused by record elimination.

The number of Chinese architectural archives remaining in existence cannot satisfy the needs of historical archivists concerned with the use, maintenance, conservation and restoration of historical buildings.  As a result, archivists now tend to think that it is never a mistake to keep everything, just in case.

In addition, national archival policies allocate supplies for personnel, financial support, space and equipment based on the volume of archives in holdings and the benchmarks for the excellence of an archival institution are decided by the quantity of archives collected.  Thus, archivists are encouraged to keep everything regardless of prescribed disposal practices.

UDAs came into existence only in 1980’s.  The majority of them were purpose-built in the 1990’s and they still have only small amounts in their holdings.  Since they have little pressure on their storage space, most are making efforts to preserve everything regardless of expense and consequences.

3.3   Methodology problems

However, the most serious problems of appraisal are the internal factors that are the methodological problems of Chinese appraisal theory and their inappropriateness to the architectural archives¹⁷.  Methodological problems concern the uniqueness of architectural appraisal that general archival principles cannot cover, such as rules of appraisal for observation, reasoning and communication, that is, ways of archival thinking in appraisal, the selection criteria, the framework of appraisal, appraisal standards, etc.

Ways of archival thinking for appraisal are reactive and passive.  According to the Archives Law, archivists in archival repositories have no authority to decide what should be documented and what should be kept.  They are only responsible for what to preserve and what to have transferred to them.  As a result, the preserved values and retention periods are usually decided by the creators and the file mangers.  Archivists usually can only take what exists rather than select what should be documented and preserved.

Traditional archival theory has been challenged in its dealings with architectural archives.  For instance, traditional archival theory requires archives to be kept according to subject-fond so as to maintain the integrity of the social memory of the organization.  Thus, architectural archives have to be kept either by its creating units or by historical Danganguan for permanent custody.

But according to object-fond theory, records from a project should be kept as a whole set, the permanent preservation of original architectural archives should be in UDAs for the integrity of professional memory of the built environment.  There are many debates and arguments over what should be the final destination of architectural archives and archivists are confused by theories and standards.

The frameworks for the selection of architectural archives are fragmented.  There is no consistent and sustainable standard for the physical and intellectual control of architectural archives throughout the record’s creation, recordkeeping, transferring and custody during the life span of a building object.

The national appraisal standards are too rough.  The two Regulations are too abstract.  There is a lack of detailed workable procedures for implementation and measurement.

The selection criteria have very little concern for the cost of preservation and the percentages use of holdings.  “Cost-value calculations are not the whole answer to appraisal problems, but they are a necessary part of the data on which appraisal decisions bases.”¹⁸

In conclusion, it is the above internal and external factors that create difficulties for Chinese archivists trying to be successful in architectural archives appraisal practice.

4.0   Recommendations for Future

To solve these problems and meet the challenges, there is need for collaboration between archival custodians, administrators, records managers, records creators, and users; between urban development professional administration policy makers, archival policy makers, architectural activities players and their archival custodians.

There is a need for post-custodian archival and records continuum regime thinking in the physical and intellectual control of architectural archives.  There is need for an integrated framework in national appraisal policy making and for partnerships in its implementation.

There is a need for information sharing, co-ordination and collaborations among archival custodians and file managers in making documentation plans, acquisition policies and retention schedule standards.

There is a need for object- and subject-integrated functional analysis in a records continuum regime.

There is a need for establishing cost-benefit benchmarks and consistent criteria for measuring preserved values of records during the life of the built environment.  Furthermore, to solve both internal and external roots of problems and to meet challenges, research should be promoted as a means for the improvement of archival theory and its application to architectural activities.

A review of two major Chinese archives magazines¹⁹ published from 1992 to 2002 shows that nothing has been written on the appraisal of architectural archives.  Indeed, little has been written on architectural archives at all²⁰

There has, so far, been neither theoretical nor empirical research on the appraisal of architectural archives²¹

It can be argued that there is a need for research on architectural archives and an appraisal of archival theory and practice.  There is a need to study the experience of the success and failures of different archival appraisal policies in Chinese architectural practice.  There is a need for comparative study of general rules and criteria for best practice cross-culture.  There is a need to develop an integrated and unified policy framework and indicators of performance for cost-effective and client-satisfactory services.

The following questions need to be answered:

• What are the successes and failures in Chinese architectural appraisal practices? What are the appraisal models for cost-effective and client-satisfactory best practice? How could we measure the best practice?
• What are the unique features of architectural archives?  What are the implications for developing integrated frameworks for architectural appraisal using a records continuum regime for solving the problems identified? When is the proper time for architectural appraisal? What is the appropriate repository for permanent custody? What are the roles of archivists in safeguarding the quality and quantity of the memory of the built environment for complete, systematic, accurate, authentic, reliable and readable information? Who would be the most appropriate archival authorities for architectural archives appraisal?
• What are the international standards and best practices of archival appraisal experience abroad? How have they been implemented in architectural archives? Do they have similar problems? What are the comparative elements and general rules for cross-culture and cross-disciplinary study?

URBAN ARCHITECTURE, Lijiang, Shanxi: Provincial urban architecture of Lijiang old town among the beautiful Yulong Snow hills.

To summarize, the appraisal of architectural archives in Chinese practice is subject to legal frameworks that require archives creators to provide better institutional documentation and archival custodians to improve services to meet the needs of urban planning, construction and the management of a city.

However, there is great weakness in the lack of concerns for interrelationships between archives across institutional and disciplinary boundaries.  There is no information sharing about appraisal decision-making between policy makers.  This creates conflicts in policies for preserved values of records or for the choice of permanent custody, thereby increasing overlaps.  Further, there is no cost-benefit consideration in policymaking, thus wasting resources available for archival selection and preservation.

To conclude, there is need for research into providing integrated and unified economic ways to analyse huge and complex interrelated records as a total system and not on a traditional series component basis.²²

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The Author

Dr An Xiaomi is an associate professor and tutor at the Archives College of Renmin University of China in Beijing.  In 2001, she gained a Ph.D. degree in records and archives management at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.  In the late 1980’s, she achieved a Bachelor of Engineering degree in building materials from Southeast University, Nanjing, and dual B.A and B.Sc degrees in science and technology records and archives management from Nanjing University.

Dr An is a council member of the Chinese Urban Development Archives and Information Professional Committee, a member of the Education and Training Section of International Council on Archives (ICA/SAE), the Architectural Records Section of ICA (ICA/AR) and of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums (ICAM).  She has published more than 70 academic papers and is editor-in-chief or author of seven books.  In May 2002, she published her work Towards a Best Practice Framework for Managing Urban Development Archives: Case Studies from the UK and China (Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press English).  She is now leading research and writing a book on best practice standards for managing urban development records and archives and the quality assurance to comply with the International Standards Organisation’s Records Management standard, ISO15489 (2001).  She can be contacted at xiaomia@yahoo.com.

For further reading on recordkeeping in the People’s Republic of China, see Dr. An’s paper   “A Chinese view of Records Continuum methodology and implications for managing Electronic Records”

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Footnotes

by Dr. An Xiaomi

Dr An Xiaomi

Abstract

This paper was written for the author’s presentation at an international symposium on “OA System and the Management of Archival Electronic Records: Theory and Practice” held in Hangzhou, south east China, from November 11 to 13, 2001.  It examines concepts of the records continuum theory in three phases of usage, mechanisms for best practice behind the model in contrast to the life cycle mode and a best practice framework for managing electronic records.   A Mandarin Chinese version was due to be published in Archives Science Bulletin in China in 2002.

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1.        Introduction

To provide coherent and consistent service to satisfying the needs of users has long been a challenge to records managers and archivists throughout the world.  It is particularly so when we meet such needs in digital world.

Timely access of accurate, reliable, authentic, complete and readable records over time is always a difficult for both users and the custodians.  Archivists have tried hard to find appropriate approaches for managing electronic records in recent years.

This paper promotes the internationally recommended records continuum model as a best practice model for managing electronic records and archives within a broader context of archival science.  (Flynn 2001, pp.79-93, Pucknell 2000, pp.12-13).  The paper first analyses the concepts of the records continuum in its three periods of development, then explores the best practice mechanisms behind the records continuum model in contrast to life cycle model, finally it deduces and proposes a best practice framework for managing electronic records based on the mechanisms introduced.

2.       Concepts of the Records Continuum Model

A definition of the records continuum is given in the Australia Records Management Standard AS4390 that refers to “…a consistent and coherent regime of management processes from the time of the creation of records (and before creation, in the design of recordkeeping system) through to the preservation and use of records as archives.” (AS4390 1996, part 1: clause 4.22)

It can be observed that the definition suggests an ideal of integration for documents, records and archives management.

The evolution of the concepts of records continuum can be seen in three periods: origins of the continuum concept; wide use of the word ‘continuum’; and the formulation and implementation of records continuum model to the electronic and paper records management.

In the first period, the earliest view of the continuum concept came from the national archivist, Ian Maclean in the 1950’s.   He declared that records managers were the true archivists, and that archival science should be directed towards the study of the characteristics of recorded information, recordkeeping systems and classification processes (Upward 2000, p.118).  His view promoted the search for continuity between archives and records management.

In the second period, the word continuum was not widely used in Australian recordkeeping in the mid of 1980s until Canadian archivist Jay Atherton made it explicit at the annual conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists in 1985.  According to Atherton, all stages of records are interrelated, forming a continuum in which both records managers and archivists are involved, to varying degrees, in the ongoing management of recorded information.  He showed how the life cycle stages that records supposedly underwent were in fact a series of recurring and reverberating activities within both archives and records management.

The underlying unifying or linking factor in this continuum was the function of service to the records’ creators and all their users (Flynn 2001, p.80).  This view pointed out the weakness of the separation of records management and archives administration under the lifecycle model.

Frank Upward

In the third period, records continuum as a model way of thinking was formulated in the 1990s by Australian archival theorists, Frank Upward (See Figure1.  The Upward’s records continuum model).  He states four principles of the records continuum model.

1. A concept of ‘record’ which is inclusive of records of continuing value (archives), which stresses their uses for transactional, evidentiary and memory purposes, and which unifies approaches to archiving/recordkeeping whether records are kept for a split second or a millennium…
2. A focus on records as logical rather than physical entities, regardless of whether they are in paper or electronic form…
3. Institutionalisation of the recordkeeping profession’s role requires a particular emphasis on the need to integrate recordkeeping into business and societal processes and purposes…
4. Archival science is the foundation for organising knowledge about recordkeeping…  Such knowledge in revisable but can be structured and can be explored in terms of the operation of principles for action in the past, the present and the future…

(Upward 1996, pp.275-277)

The model has four axes dealing with archivists’ concerns on four major themes in archival science: evidentiality, transactionality, identity, and recordkeeping containers.

Four dimensions of the continuum are identified: document creation, records capture, the organisation of corporate and personal memory, and the pluralisation of collective memory.

“The model provides a graphical tool for framing issues about the relationship between records managers and archivists, past, present and future, and for thinking strategically about working collaboratively and building partnerships with other stakeholders.” (McKemmish 1998, p.2)

Pederson (1999) stated that such a model has four basic recordkeeping functions: CADS

Control:  Capture, identification, organisation and control.

Accessibility:  Ensuring access and usability.

Disposal:  Setting up provisions (appraisal criteria and disposal policies or procedures) for “capturing” appropriate records and for “cleansing” the regime of records that are no longer needed, whether for business, regulation or cultural/historical purposes.

Storage:  Maintaining record authenticity, integrity and usability over time.

Figure 1. The Records Continuum Model (Upward 2000, p.123)

Pedersen pointed out that the continuum-based recordkeeping model as depicted in the general graphic model articulates a framework which identifies and manages documentary relationships, processes, systems and their outputs (records) at four levels of perspective (Pederson, 1999).   Kennedy and Schauder (1998) further explained the four dimensions that Upward used in his concept of the continuum model.   Their views can be brought together as:

• At level one, the model applies itself to identifying accountable acts and ensures that reliable evidence of them is created by capturing records of the related/supporting transactions. Records of business activities are created as part of business communication processes within the organisations (e.g. through e-mail, document management software, or other software applications)
• At level two, recordkeeping systems manage “families” of transactions and records series documenting processes at the work unit or single function scope of complexity. Records that have been created or received in an organisation are tagged with information (metadata) about them, including the ways they link to other records.

• At level three, a seamless recordkeeping regime embraces the multiple systems and families of records that service the entire documentary needs (business, regulatory & cultural/ educational/ historical) of a single juridical entity. Records become part of a formal system of storage and retrieval that constitutes the corporate memory of the organisation.

• At level four, one comprehends a regime that services the needs of the total society and its constituent functions and entities that carry them out. It takes the form of a collaborative recordkeeping establishment, under the guidance of a suitably empowered public recordkeeping authority, that services the documentary needs of many juridical entities within its jurisdiction and ensures the accountability and the cultural memory of the society as a whole. Records that are required for purposes of societal accountability (e.g., by corporate law) or other forms of collective memory become part of wider archival systems which comprise records from a range organisations.

(Kennedy and Scharder 1998 and Pederson 1999)

Flynn (2001) gave a conclusion of the work done by Atherton and Upward.  She analysed that the records continuum model has six characteristics as follows:

• A unified and homogenous system for the management of records (including archives) in any format throughout their lifetime, however long or short that life time is;

• The synchronic existence of a record or an accumulation of records in more than one “dimension” of context and use, rather than the diachronic movement of a record or accumulation of records through one discrete and compartmentalised lifecycle stage after another;

• An engagement with the establishment and design of record-keeping systems, even before records have been created;

• Co-operation and sharing of responsibility for records (including archives) and record-keeping systems, particularly between records managers and archivist;

• The concept of service to the users of records, whether internal or external to the creating organisation, throughout the lifetime of those records;

• A sense of the provenance, organisational and social context in which records are created and maintained.

(Flynn 2001, pp.83-84)

3.      Mechanisms of Best Practice Behind Records Continuum Model

Flynn (2001) pointed out the records continuum model is significant for three important reasons, among others.

• Firstly, it widens the possibilities of interpretation of records and recordkeeping systems offered by the lifecycle model, widening which is helpful given the variety of current contexts in which archivists and records managers operate, and in which archives and records are used.

• Secondly, it reminds us the fact that records (including archives) are created and maintained for their uses, as a result of business and administrative functions and processes, rather than as an end in themselves.

• Lastly, it emphasises co-operation beyond the walls of our repositories, especially between the closely related if occasionally estranged professions of archives administration and records management-a co-operation which is more important than ever in the contemporary climate of outsourcing and cross-sector working.

(Flynn 2001, p.90)

The best practice mechanisms behind the records continuum model may be explored by a comparative study of the difference between the records continuum model and life cycle model, seen in Figure 2.  It can be observed that the records continuum model differ from life cycle model in 10 aspects.

• Origins of the model,
• Elements of records definition,
• Major concerns in records management,
• Records movement patterns,
• Recordkeeping perspectives,
• Recordkeeping process,
• Criteria for selecting archives,
• Time of appraisal,
• Role of recordkeeping managers,
• Undertaking records management tasks.

Figure 2.  Records Continuum model in Contrast to Lifecycle Model

The above difference between the records continuum model and lifecycle model shows the advantages of the records continuum over the lifecycle, particular in electronic records management.

The primary focus of the continuum is the multiple purposes of records.  It aims at the development of recordkeeping systems that capture, manage and maintain records with sound evidential characteristics for as long as the records are of value to the organisation, any successor, or society.  It promotes the integration of recordkeeping into the business systems and processes of organisation (Marshall 2000, p.24).

It can be argued that the mechanism of best practice behind the records continuum model is using an integrated approach for managing records and archives.  The records managers and archivists are brought together under an integrated recordkeeping framework towards the same goals to guarantee the reliability, authenticity and completeness of the records.

The framework would provide common understandings, consistent standards, unified best practice criteria, interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations in the recordkeeping and archiving process for both the paper and the digital worlds.  It provides sustainable recordkeeping to connect the past with the present and the present to the future, which can coherently exist in a broader dynamic and changeable context that can be influenced by legal, political, administrative, social, commercial, technological, cultural and historical variables across time-space (An 2001, pp.14-15).  The integrated recordkeeping framework would:

• Facilitate provenance;
• Underpin accountability;
• Constitute memory;
• Construct identity;
• Provide authoritative sources of value-added information

(McKemmish 1998, p.4)

The continuum purpose-oriented systems approach to records management fundamentally changes the role of recordkeeping.  Instead of being reactive, responding to the need to manage records after they have been created, recordkeeping must be proactive, identifying in partnership with other stakeholders those records of the organisation’s activities that need to be retained, and then implementing business systems that are designed with built-in recordkeeping capability to capture records of evidential quality as they are created.

Built-in capture and assessment means that records of value are created in the first place whenever electronic systems are used for business transactions.  With appropriate metadata to ensure that they are accurate, complete, reliable and usable, these records have the necessary attributes of content, context and structure to act as evidence of business activity.  And knowing from the outset which electronic records must be kept for the longer term means that those records can then be migrated across systems as hardware and software upgrades occur (Marshall 2000, p.25).

The lifecycle mode uses a birth to death analogy to describe records as passing through a series of stages, it provides a fragmented framework for recordkeeping in artificially dividing the mission of records and archives management; in dismantling the responsibilities of records managers and archivists into divided roles; in limited ways of thinking in terms of custody by narrowed selection criteria; in viewing records as tangible physical objects in a paper world and static environment.  (An 2001, pp.5-16)

The lifecycle model has serious problems when it deals with electronic records.  It simply regards electronic records as new media or physical records like film, recordings and microfiche but needing special handling requirements.  The life cycle’s view of a record as a physical entity having a series of distinct and separate phases of usage runs into difficulties with electronic records.  The nature and volatility of these records negates this approach.  Electronic records must be located where the hardware and software systems that provide their  ‘living’ environment are located, thus defying the traditional repository and custodial orientation of the life cycle.  As far as accessibility and use are concerned in the networked world, the actual location of the systems that store records is irrelevant (Marshall 2000, p.24).

In conclusion, it can be argued that the mechanisms of best practice behind the records continuum model are an ideal of integration for records and archives management.  This means it focuses on:

• Similarities rather than differences;
• Qualities and quantities rather than only quantities;
• Positive and cohesive rather than disparate or passive ways of thinking;
• Integrated rather than fragmented frameworks to policy making;
• Integrated control rather than separate control to policy implementation;
• Integrated rather than disparate approaches to problem solving; and on
• Giving satisfaction to clients by collaboration rather than duplication and overlap.

(An 2001, pp.1-15).

The above comparative study highlights the importance of the records continuum model as best practice model for managing electronic records in aiming to improve responsiveness, increase efficiency and satisfy users requirements.

4.       A Best Practice Framework for Managing Electronic Records

It can be assumed that the ideal of integration from the records continuum model can be developed as a best practice framework for managing records within a broader context of archival science  … to connect the past to the present and the present to the future, particularly for managing electronic records.  The best practice framework would be comprised of three components: the integrated frameworks, integrated approaches and integrated control, see Figure 3.

Figure 3. Components of a Best Practice Framework

Within the best practice framework, the integrated frameworks would provide levels of integration as requirements for best practice; the integrated approaches would provide positive ways of thinking for archival concepts, the integrated control would provide a set of unified criteria for measuring models and methods to the best practice, see Figure 4.

Figure 4. A Best Practice Framework for Managing Electronic Records (An 2001, p.12)

The meanings of the three components of a best practice framework can be explained as follows:

4.1.1       An Integrated Framework

An integrated framework sees the management of records as an archival business geared to client-satisfaction service, cost-effective management and best value records.  It should be customer-driven and work process-integrated into records management and it should also produce good quality information.  This means that five levels of integration should be built up into the management of recordkeeping processes.  These are:

• Common culture: common understandings and expectations among creators, users, custodians and administrators on the values and functionality of documents, records and archives;
• Common standards: consistent terminology and procedures to make the records continuum regime easier to maintain and interface throughout the records movement and the recordkeeping processes;
• Information sharing: mutual use of best practice criteria, policies and standards in business processes that operate independently throughout the procedures and processes of business management;
• Co-ordination: negotiation and exchange of records management policies permitting separate but independent management to respond to each other’s needs and limitations;
• Collaboration: partnerships of creators, users, custodians and administrators in the implementation of integrated frameworks and policies as well as accountability for society.

4.1.2       An Integrated Approach

An “integrated approach” attempts to develop collaborative ways of thinking by guaranteeing a reliable, authentic and integrated memory of the organisation and society; providing consistent and sustainable recordkeeping services to meet societal needs; and by promoting professional commitments and value added contributions for best practice.

Such an integrated approach should employ three tools of integration as a basis for dealing with electronic and digital issues.  The tools are a client-led marketing strategy, post-modern archival thinking and records continuum regime model.  They would provide systematic, open and active thinking for produce universal archival principles for best practice in the digital era.

A client-led marketing strategy it means that the needs of creators and users are highlighted as the mission of recordkeeping service and such needs are met effectively.

Post-modern archival thinking considers archiving to be a key feature of society’s communication processes in shaping the reality rather than just documenting it.  It views archivists as co-creators of knowledge, culture, and society rather than just passive recipients merely guarding and retrieving records and knowledge created entirely by others.  Thus, post-modern insights suggest that archives study is a vital aspect of the pursuit of human understanding.

The study of archives is no longer just for archivists who want to be effective on the job, valuable as that is.  It is for creators who want to be accountable for the society and for users who want best value of archives service as well.  (Nesmith 1999) A post-modern archival thinking should result in a front-end control and integrated control records and archives management service and should enable a collaborative approach for recordkeeping across borders, institutions and disciplines.

With the records continuum regime model, an internationally recommended best practice model is applied as the approach for managing documents, records and archives.  Such a model should employ an interdisciplinary approach to develop integrated frameworks and integrated control through documents management, records management and archives management and through business management along the life the records to ensure the accuracy, authenticity, reliability and integrity of records.

4.1.3       An Integrated Control

Integrated control means that the control of product, process and service should be integrated into the management processes of recordkeeping which would result from integrated approaches and integrated frameworks.  It is a means for bringing together the contribution of each participant with something to offer.  It provides a means of increasing the total contribution and completeness of records delivery and of improving collaboration among creators, users and archival administrators and custodians for better quality of recordkeeping service.  In this way we can identify, preserve and use the accurate, authentic, reliable and complete records.

Such integrated control provides a set of criteria for measuring models and approaches to best practice in Three aspects.  These are: product control; recordkeeping management process control; and client-oriented service control.

Product control means that the output of a records and archives management program or system can be measured by the quality and quantity of records.  The indicators for quality would be accuracy, authenticity and reliability; the indicators of quantity would be completeness or system or integrity to records.

Process control means that the process of records and archives management can be measured by its integrated frameworks.  The indicators would be effectiveness, economy and efficiency to records management process.

Service control means the delivery of the service can be measured by the sustainability and consistency of service to the satisfaction of the clients.  The indicators would be availability, accessibility and readability of and timely access to records.

The best practice framework uses collaborative methodologies to explore the current provision of approaches to best practice.  The best practice can be measured from three aspects within an integrated framework, the product control to best value of records, the process control to cost-effectiveness and the service control to client-satisfaction.

Such a collaborative methodology is interdisciplinary, it views the recordkeeping as crossing the borders of documents management, records management and archives management.  It believes that the accountability of recordkeeping lies across organisations and the roles of creators, users, administrators and custodians under the same umbrella of an integrated framework throughout the life of a record.  (An 2001)

5.       Conclusion

The evolution of the concept of records continuum shows the processes of records management and archives management moving towards integration.  The advantages of records continuum model over lifecycle model demonstrate that the mechanism behind the best practice is an ideal of integration for the management of documents, records and archives.  It can be suggested that the idea of integration can be developed towards a best practice framework for records and archives management.  Integrated approaches, integrated control and integrated framework can be components of a best practice framework.  They should provide positive ways of thinking, integrated requirements and unified criteria leading towards best practice.  The best practice can be measured by client-satisfaction service, cost-effective management process and best value records.

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The Author

Renmin University, Beijing

Dr. An Xiaomi is an associate professor and tutor at the School of Information Resources Management at the Renmin University of China in Beijing.  In 2001, she gained a Ph.D. degree in records and archives management at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.  In the late1980’s, she achieved a Bachelor of Engineering degree in building materials from Southeast University, Nanjing, and dual B.A and B.Sc degrees in science and technology records and archives management from Nanjing University.

Dr. An is a council member of the Chinese Urban Development Archives and Information Professional Committee, a member of the Education and Training Section of International Council on Archives (ICA/SAE), the Architectural Archives Section of ICA (ICA/AR) and of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums (ICAM). She has published more than 70 academic papers and is editor-in-chief or author of seven books. In 2001, she lead the translation of the international records management standard ISO15489 into Mandarin Chinese. She can be contacted at xiaomia@yahoo.com.

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For further reading on recordkeeping in the People’s Republic of China, see Dr. An’s paper: “Appraisal of Architectural Archives in China: A Critique”

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References

An Xiaomi.  “Towards A Best Practice Framework for Managing Urban Development Archives: Case Studies from the UK and China”, University of Liverpool, U.K., PhD.  thesis, 2001.

AS 4390.  Australian Standard  – Records Management, Standards Australia, Sydney, Australia, 1996

Birch, Rhiannon.  ” The Records Continuum”, The Newsletter 127, Society of Archivists, U.K., January 2000: pp.13-14.

Wickman, Danielle.  “What’s New? Functional Analysis in Life Cycle and Continuum Environment”, Archives and Manuscripts 26, no.1, Australian Society of Archivists, O’Connor, ACT, 1999: pp.114-127.

Flynn, Sarah J.A.  “The Records Continuum Model in Context and its Implications for Archival Practice”, Journal of the Society of Archivists 22, no.1, Society of Archivists, U.K. 2001: pp.79-83.

Kennedy, Jay and Schauder, Cherry.  Records Management: A Guide to Corporate Recordkeeping, 2nd ed., 1998.

ISO15489-1 International Standards for Records Management draft, 1997.

Marshall, Peter.   “Life Cycle Versus Continuum: What is the Difference?” Informaa Quarterly 16, no.2, Records Management Association of Australia, Sydney, May 2000: pp.20-25.

Professor Sue McKemmish

McKemmish, Sue, and Piggott, Michael (eds).  The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years.  Ancora Press and Australian Archives (later National Archives of Australia), Sydney, ISBN 0 868 62019: 1994. 252 pp.

McKemmish, Sue.  Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: A Continuum Responsibility, 1998, on-line at http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum/smckp2.html.   (accessed 29 December 2008)

Nesmith, Tom.  “Post-modern Archives: The Changing Intellectual Place of Archives”, Society of American Archivists conference, Pittsburgh, 24-27 August 1999.

Pederson, Ann.  Lifecycle and continuum – one viewpoint, Aus-archivists listserver, February 17, 1999, available at: http://lists.archivists.org.au/cgi-bin/mailman/private/aus-archivists/1999-February/001124.html (accessed 29 December 2008).

Pucknell, Jayne.  “A Continuum Approach to Records Management.” The Newsletter 127, Society of Archivists, U.K., January 2000: pp.12-13.

Sletten, Laurie.  “Lessons from Down Under: Records Management in Australia.” The Information Management Journal, ARMA International, Kansas City, January 1999: pp.26-32

Upward, Frank.  “In Search of the Continuum: Ian Maclean’s ‘Australian Experience’ Essays on Recordkeeping” in McKemmish, S.  and Piggott, M. (eds) The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First Fifty Years.  Ancora Press and Australian Archives (later National Archives of Australia), Sydney, 1994: pp110-127

Upward, Frank.  “Structuring the Records Continuum Part One: Post-custodial Principles and Properties”, Archives and Manuscripts 24, no.2, Australian Society of Archivists, O’Connor, ACT, 1996: pp.268-285

Upward, Frank.  “Structuring the Records Continuum Part Two: Structuration Theory and Recordkeeping.” Archives and Manuscripts 25, no.1, Australian Society of Archivists, O’Connor, ACT, 1997: pp.10-35

Upward, Frank.  “Modelling the Continuum as Paradigm Shift in Recordkeeping and Archiving Processes, and Beyond- a Personal Reflection”, Records Management Journal 10, no. 3., Aslib, London, 2000: pp.115-139

At the hotel’s ornate, wrought-iron veranda, a London-style taxicab, displaying incongruous “Air-con” signs,  was disgorging grey suits.  A fearsome, bearded and turbaned doorman, pristine in white Raj uniform, bowed us in, directing the suits to the left to join the late lunchers in the Tiffin Room.  We went right to the bar.

I ordered the beer from a hovering steward but my companion chipped in: “The Classic!”  I made to chide her at over-familiarity with the island’s renowned Tiger Gold Medal lager but she was shaking the rain from her thick, black Oriental hair and chattered on: “This is the famous Writers Bar.  It’s heard some pretty high-powered literary debates, and intrigues, I should think.   They all sat here  -  Joseph Conrad, Kipling, Somerset Maugham and the Master.”  My eyebrows raised the question. “Coward, Noel Coward,” she laughed, smug at my irritated grunt of recollection.

She dug a little cheroot from her ersatz Armani “sack” but before I moved, an alert bell-boy, cheerful in white uniform and cap, flicked a lighter for her.  They exchanged formal salutations in Mandarin.

The steward set our tall, chilled glasses and salted nuts on the occasional table beside our leather lounger.  The rain fell thunderously on the roof high above us in afternoon steam bath Singapore but in the cool, air-conditioned bar it was not just convention that made a jacket necessary.

A group of immense German tourists clattered into the bar, swooping on all the barstools except the two occupied by an elderly couple of ex-pat Brits, leathery and tanned, who edged further round the counter with their Singapore Sling cocktails.

Our beer was poured and I noticed the bottles for the first time,  bright new labels, not the glowing “London, Geneva and Paris” Gold Medal badges. She wished me: “Kung hay fat choi!”  I returned the blithe New Year blessing with a stilted: “Cheers!”

She inquired: “Like it?  It’s a fairly new Tiger brew made for the New Year.  Mustn’t have too much, it’s very strong.”  Hmmmm,  very smooth, too, delicate amber hue, firm head, a little more malt than the Gold Medal, but still nicely dry on the tongue and cool in the throat.  Comfortable for the soul, I decided.  She went on: “Asian Pacific brewed it first about five years ago.  Just goes with a thunder storm, don’t you think?  They also began a Raffles Light ale.  I don’t care for it, but some of the girls prefer it for long drinking occasions”

We watched, comfortably remote, as the Germans settled rowdily to their beer, oblivious to the cool appraisal of the ex-pats who began to gather up their belongings. A sympathetic steward fussed over their account.  My companion remarked: “Oh, did you know, it’s your year!”  My year?

“Yes, goodbye to the pig, welcome to the Year of the Rat.  Weren’t you born in September nineteen …”  Yes, yes, yes, that’s right!  My year, eh?  “Yes, the 12 animals in the Chinese Zodiac start with the Rat.  He’s not the sinister, rapacious animal as in your culture. To the Chinese he’s gregarious, cunning and likes his own patch.”

You’d think differently if you knew how the rat had nearly wiped out the kiwi.  Swiftly protective, she argued: “Oh, you cannot blame the rat for that.  You took him to New Zealand.  He didn’t want to go, did he!”

Concentrated pouring of another Tiger Classic  – the third, was it?  -  halted the vermin vein of our murmurings.   Very delicate nose, a touch of green almonds but more flowery than that, one of the tarter plums, perhaps.  The bottles glowed with the colour of Chinese good luck like the miles of reds streamers and bunting that bestrewed the city and most of the Chinese world.

Weren’t the dragon dancers marvellous, I ventured. “Lion!” she corrected. “Lion dancers.  Didn’t you see the manes?”  Oh, and the firecrackers were ear-splitting.  “Almost as noisy as the storm”, she remembered delightedly.  Ah, the storm …  it was leaving the city, rolling North to wreak more havoc with the celebrations on the Malaysian Peninsular.  The ex-pats were leaving, too.  She, apprehensive of squeezing past the rumbustious drinkers, held back. He opened a path between the tourists, claiming passage with his outstretched umbrella.  The bucolic Berlin wall crunched shut behind them, scarcely aware of the crossing.

Another New Year flier? “Oh, no!” She was getting giggly. “We’ve got an edition to get out. They’ll be thinking I’ve gone …”  She used a dirty word for a naughty Mandarin maiden.  “Tell you what, there’s a festival on the river this evening.  If we got down to the Boat Quay early, we could grab a table, try the regular Tiger and watch the dragon boats.”   We left the coolth of the Writers Bar, its leviathans and literary ghosts, and drifted back into sauna Singapore.  Her delinquent laughter hardened my wavering resolve to get those few remaining damned page make-ups done and out of the way, a.s.a.p.

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In the North Staffordshire moorland town of Leek, named by the 10th-century Norse invader-rulers as Lec, “the place at the brook”, the Black Swan is one of a flock of delightful public houses in this working-class town.

Built 300 years ago as a mortuary for victims of one of the genocidal Black Plague epidemics that ravaged England, the building became the Black Swan in memory of its grim, charnel origins.  Now it’s a cheerful, homely hostelry with open fires that once burned local coal.  In the pre-packaged new millennium, the grates are natural gas-fired with look-alike ceramic coals giving the old style glow but none of the ash.

Behind the bar, pretty Gayle in dark-blue Honda sweatshirt sporting a red plastic fun-brooch of a baby-bearing stork, was pulling pints of Pedigree Bitter from the county’s famous brewery Marston, Thompson and Evershed, of Shobnall Road, Burton-on-Trent, the finest brewing town in England.  Sometimes she drew other beverages from pumps labelled “Castlemaine XXXX” and “Murphy” but we ignored that.

“Have you met Owd Roger?” asked my companion Steve Dyer, a beer-man to his boots, who has traced his family back to a 16th century brewing family in England’s West Country.  I hadn’t had the pleasure.  Beside curious concoctions in green glass glorying in the name of “Castaway”, Gayle found the ancient ale in tiny 180ml brown bottles with nondescript labels.  Indicating my near-empty pint tumbler she asked: “Do you want it in there, duck?”

Our eyebrows hoist in horror and she explained, hurriedly: “Some of them like to mix it,” adding cheerfully: “It’ll give you a headache.”  The label confirmed that potential, declaring: “Alc. 7.6% Vol”.  A standard UK bitter beer goes down at between 3.5% and 4%, and at 4.5% is considered Strong Ale.  In past years, Owd Roger could have been called barley wine.

Owd Roger is Marstons’ strongest brew.  The recipe, my mate Steve said, was found in the archives of a venerable pub, the Royal Standard, miles south in the Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield.  How it got to Burton-on-Trent he didn’t know but Marstons brew it now from malted barley, yeast from their own Burton Union sets, a hop variety called English Aroma, water from local Burton wells and “nothing else”, the brewers boast.

It has a bitter sweetness, dark, secret and smoky.  It is a sensuous, silky ale to be sipped and savoured with wary respect.  Gayle advised: “We used to serve it on draft, but they local lads couldn’t be doing with it.”  I wasn’t surprised to hear it.  At 7.6% alcohol by volume and drunk by the pint it would have made their shoes leak, never mind headaches.

First published in the journal of Wellington’s short-lived but long lamented private Storm Brewery. c.1995.

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Simon Longue (”Longey, like your ex-P.M., old boy!”) and I had run for shelter and to hear the gossip from barman Robbie, as round and jolly as the barrels he rolls about the ancient cellars, and do a little tipping ourselves.

“Th’ Ol’ Speckled ‘En’s good,” Robbie advised.  We hesitated.  It’s a strong, pale ale, 5.2% alcohol by volume.  Courage Directors and Ruddles County bitters were on offer, too, and an afternoon only just begun.  Just one, we ordered in unison.

“Brewed in me home town, Abingdon,” said Simon, adding unnecessarily, “Oxfordshire.”  I examined the beer-engine label  –  Morland and Co plc., Abingdon, Oxon, with trademark of  George Morland, descendant of the founder, artist and bibber with palette and tankard, peri-wig, red frockcoat and tricorn  –  and murmured thoughtfully: “Odd name for a beer.”

“Goes back to 1927, or so I’m told,” said Simon, his tall pint pot already showing signs of serious depletion.  As I savoured the ale’s noisette nose and dry malt palate he went on: “That’s when M.G. Motors produced a one-off saloon, a canvas-covered job.  Didn’t seem to think it would sell so they used it as a factory vehicle. Painted it gold flecked with black.”  The pot emptied. “Factory staff called it the ‘old speckled ‘un’.  Name got corrupted to ‘the old speckled hen’ like these things do, y’know.”

Cockney Robbie had heard it all before but paused in his tumbler polishing and picked up our empty mugs.  “Bloke in ‘ere ‘ad four pints t’other nigh’.   Was callin’ it ol’ pickled chicken and cacklin’ like one before I sent ‘im ‘ome.”  Robbie cares as much for his customers as he does for his brews.  Chortling, he pulled two more lightly-tanned pints and peered critically at the faintly oatmeal-coloured head, studying depth and density.

Simon was not to be side-tracked. “Then M.G. asks Morlands to produce a special ale to mark the 50th anniversary of their Abingdon works.  Morlands come up with this and name it after the old car. Odd, eh?”  Nothing odd about the beer, I observed.  Morlands have been brewing since before Captain James Cook, R.N., was born, 1711 actually, and gets the dry finish for Old Speckled Hen from a strain of yeast it’s used since before the turn of the century … the 20th, of course.

“Really!” said Simon.

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