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.

Keeping up standards: a phrase that means many things to many people. To recordkeepers it is central to efficiency and expertise. In a 1998 presentation, Michael Hoyle, the manager of the Statutory-Regulatory Group of Archives New Zealand (formerly the National Archives of New Zealand) shows the relevance of recordkeeping standards to information management professionals. He identifies definitions, types of standards, standard setting organisations and shows how they may help improve recordkeeping.