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.

An Editorial published in the April 2000 edition of Archifacts, the bi-annual journal of the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand, and is reproduced with the kind permission of the Editor and writer, Dr Brad Patterson.

The historical emergence of information management in Germany and its crucial significance for the recordkeeping functions of the modern nation, by Marburg Archivschule Senior Lecturer Dr Nils Brübach.

Governance: The exercise of the delegated power of governing or managing corporate bodies, be they national or local government, commerce or non-profit organisations. The power is given by the people, the society created by and for the benefit of its members and operated within a firm structure of laws to balance individual liberty with social justice. Society’s potent defence against despotic bureaucracy: first-class record-keeping by a trustworthy authority. Victoria University of Wellington don James Traue presents the case against sub-ordination of the National Archives.

The former New Zealand Government’s proposals for re-organising its National Archives were seen by records and information managers as a reduction in the Archives’ status and standing. However, the author, historian Dr. J. O. C. Phillips, acting head of the Archives’ managing department, the Heritage Group of the Department of Internal Affairs, argues that while the Archives’ statutory-regulatory power is valued, its role as history and heritage custodian is of equal importance.

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.