A plethora of papers by The Caldeson Consultancy Principal, Michael Steemson, on the ISO and Australian Records Management standards, recordkeeping issues in e-government and legal admissibility, and the immediate and long-term future of records management itself.
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 feels like being back home …
Update 2005: 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.
Update 2004: 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.
Update 2002: The international records management standard, ISO15489, has taken the recordkeeping world by storm. In mid-2002, a Mandarin The 2002 Update: 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
ISO15489 launch 2001: The International Standards Organisation Records Management Standard ISO15489.1 and its Guidelines, ISO TR 15489.2 were published in October 2001 after three years’ hard work by an international group of private and public sector recordkeepers. The task, in which Michael Steemson joined as a member of the Australian delegation to the creating ISO sub-committee TC46/SC11, was fraught with pressures that few of the authors envisaged when they started the job at their first working meeting in Athens in 1998.
Dateline 2001: After three years’ debate, division and doubts, the world’s recordkeepers have agreed that there is really only one way they can recommend to get the best out of a records management system. They are as surprised to discover this as anyone.
Dateline 1999: The international recordkeeping community’s standard nears completion. It was born out of AS4390, Standards Australia’s Records Management Standard, itself a brilliant development for information managers of all colour. In fact, AS4390 very nearly became the ISO standard without alteration – 4390 with an ISO badge.
The campaign by the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand and the New Zealand Society of Genealogists to stop the merger of the National Archives of New Zealand (now “Archives New Zealand”) into a Government business unit, the Heritage Group, was featured in Wellington’s morning paper “The Dominion” in March 1998 after Editor Richard Long requested it from Michael Steemson, an adviser to the campaign. The 600-word feature argued that the status and importance of the Archives were slowly degenerating to that of a mere warehouse for historians.
The paper identifies a course of development for records and information management to the end of the second decade of the 21st Century. It sets out four crusades of endeavour for records and information managers, the development of internationally accepted codes of practice, standards, retention schedules and management software, in what is perceived as an inevitable revolution to harness and control the soaring paper and electronic record usage in society. It becomes an allegory, describing a records and information fictional (R.I.-fi?) but, it argues, attainable world where “Information Strategy” (IS) has achieved the status of directorship in commerce and the IS Director controls policy and actions on a multi-level business platform.
Digital derring-do for the Information Manager: Consultancy principal Michael Steemson’s 1995 case study of an eight-year project to develop an image-based news and picture library at a large British newspaper group for which he worked.