The Management of Information from Archives

Michael Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351886031
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This authoritative guide to the principles and practice of archives management in private and public sector organizations has been substantially revised. It now provides detailed advice on changes in national and international standards and approaches, in particular ISAD(G) (International Standard Archival Description) and ISASAR(CPF) (International Standard Archive Authority Record). The new edition also includes guidance on the interpretation of the Manual of Archival Description, also published by Gower. Michael Cook takes the reader through the history, definition and function of archives and archival services, international service models, staffing and resource issues. He explains how to set up and run a records management programme, manage the interface with archival management, conduct a records survey, set up retention schedules and organize appraisal, acquisition and disposal in a way which ensures the service meets organizational and individual needs. Chapters covering the arrangement, coding and description of archival material, and the administration of its physical storage, demonstrate how efficient management facilitates the accessibility of archival information. The book concludes with chapters on computing and user issues, such as rights of access, Freedom of Information, security and data protection standards. This key reference on best practice is intended for students and lecturers in archives administration and records management, and for archives and records managers, particularly those newly qualified or seeking professional registration. Managers without formal qualifications but responsible for records or archives management, and information managers working with archivists and records managers, will find it helps to improve working methods and to run a more effective archives service within the modern information management environment.

Chapter 1
Archival Management in an Information Context

This book describes the management of information derived from archival media. There are already several books on archives administration and rather fewer on records management. In both fields, the literature has taken its starting-point from the existing practice of an archives or records management service. In most cases this was one of the large national archives services: the British Public Record Office in the case of Sir Hilary Jenkinson,¹ the National Archives of the USA in the case of T.R. Schellenberg.² W Benedon³ was the first influential writer on records management, and wrote from the point of view of a large American manufacturing company. Reacting to the work of these authorities, the present author⁴ brought out a manual of archives and records management which was based on the experience of smaller organizations, an experience which could more easily be translated to fit the needs and practices of the majority of people faced with problems in managing their records and archives.

Since these beginnings, a substantial literature has appeared, and the original standpoint of the various authors is now much less obvious. Good examples are the Fundamentals series of the Society of American Archivists,⁵ and the excellent practical guide produced by the Australian Society of Archivists.⁶ We have now reached a stage where both archives and records management can be seen as distinct but interrelated disciplines, independent of the traditions and preoccupations of any one institution. However, very few authors have attempted to bring together the two branches of records and of archives management.⁷

The experience and background of the early writers led them to approach the problem of explaining the administration of records or archives in basically the same way in all cases. They described the work and materials they were accustomed to, added an analysis of the underlying problems, and a superstructure of theory, and produced the whole as a kind of complete and self-justifying system. This method of treatment had the advantage, as it was perceived by most of the people involved, that it tended to emphasize the differences between archive and library techniques and systems.

Some time during the late 1950s – after T.R. Schellenberg’s momentous tour of Australia in 1954, and the appearance of the Grigg Report in the same year⁸ – there emerged a new school of archives management. The protagonists of this school, which included a number of important writers – F.B. Evans⁹, Ernst Posner¹⁰, Michael Roper¹¹ and Schellenberg himself – claimed to have perceived a new dynamism in the movement for the preservation and exploitation of archives. The feeling of the time was that archive administration had been lifted away from a rather dusty and antiquarian past in which it had largely acted as a support to historical studies. Instead it had been brought into a present in which the discipline was the direct servant of current administration and of the public.

In this new school of thought, emphasis passed away from the conservation of ancient materials, and from the study of historical interpretation, towards the provision of information in planning and government. The good management of current and recent records linked closely with this, ensured the inflow of new archives from modern activities, and provided large economies in records storage as well as improvements in administration. Seen against the background of modern trends in historical and social research, in which increasing numbers of researchers seek access to recent records, the modern school of archival theorists gave the necessary literary and theoretical backing to the spread of archives services and institutions which, encouraged by Unesco¹² and the International Council on Archives,¹³ was a feature of the 1960s and 1970s.

New Developments

In the 1990s archivists have begun to synthesize the archival literature of several countries and languages. Notable among these are Luciana Duranti, who has linked the traditions of Italy and Canada in a very fruitful way,¹⁴ and Fernanda Ribeiro, writing from Portugal, who has produced a restatement of archival theory and practice drawing widely on European and American experience.¹⁵ North American colleagues are also actively investigating many of the difficult details: Terry Cook’s re-examination of archival appraisal,¹⁶ and Hugo Stibbe’s study, drawing on Australian sources, of the use of access points in archives may be mentioned.¹⁷ From the International Congress on Archives held in Beijing in 1996, there is an increasing input from Chinese colleagues, that may be expected to become more influential over time. We are undergoing a rapid period of change and redirection.

In the meantime there had been important developments in the world of information service. Information science came into existence as a discipline associated with a set of particular practices and techniques. It made a relatively rapid conquest of librarianship: most university departments of library studies changed their names to become departments of library and information studies, or the like, during the 1970s. Computers and their effects spread rapidly, and library and documentation services got used to new habits such as centralized cataloguing and access to online databases. Information management began to establish itself as an aspect of the management of companies.

The spread of this particular movement into the world of archives was slower and incomplete. For largely historical reasons, the training of archivists is usually in separate establishments, and most archives services of any size fire managed separately and very differently from the parallel library and information services. Despite this isolation, there were influences at work, and today the world of archive administration is becoming gradually more open to ideas from the world of the other information services. This openness is especially obvious in the field of records management. Penetration by technology is a part of the reason for the spread of new ideas, but this has been slow to reach many parts of the profession, and even now is far from complete.

We are, in the 1990s, experiencing the effects of yet another wave of new approaches and technologies. In this also, archivists and records managers are feeling the effects of changes generated elsewhere, and operating powerfully in society. The most obvious feature is the change in attitude towards any public service: these now have to give much greater effort to demonstrating their accountability to their funding bodies and to their users, and to showing how they can deliver ‘value for money’. In itself, this is a beneficial change, for there is little doubt that this profession, like others, had contained a certain quality of self-satisfaction, and a tendency not to look urgently at planned outcomes. Other aspects of the change are not so useful, particularly the constant erosion of resources and the increasing tendency to merge archives services into larger units. The merger of records management into information management is a similar development, but carries with it more advantages than disadvantages.

This short survey of attitudes illuminates one interesting feature, which is that archives administration was always regarded as a branch of management, and not – even in the early days – as an auxiliary science of history, comparable with palaeography. The academic study of archival materials, their interpretation and associated technologies might perhaps be given the title of archivistics, which is a translation of a term common in languages of Latin origin. The management of archives, however, is clearly one of the many kinds of management employed in the running of large organizations today. To manage archives or records, it is not only necessary to have some knowledge of the aims and techniques of management generally, but also to share in its attitudes and ethos.

Archivists and records managers need to be able to use most of the common methods of management, and particularly they must be able to:

• ○ provide leadership for their team
• ○ secure and deploy resources
• ○ be accountable to funding agencies, line management and public scrutiny
• ○ cost all aspects of their operation
• ○ recruit and retain qualified staff, and support career development for them
• ○ apply all relevant human resources regulations.

After this, it is necessary to add one further observation. The management styles and techniques that are appropriate for running an archives service are not the same as those suitable for running a profit-making business. The model for a large archives service would be more appropriately derived from a collegiate structure (where professional colleagues are broadly equal collaborators) than from a pyramidal structure (where a small number of directors issue instructions to a larger number of workers). Archives services can only run well where there is a general diffusion of expert knowledge throughout the team, and a necessary consequence of this is that responsibility should be delegated to team members as far as possible, according to their capacity. Where records management is concerned, it is not so easy to generalize, but a common and good pattern is similar: a small team sharing expertise and responsibility works better within the context of a larger organization than an autocratically directed workforce.¹⁸

The first edition of this book, which appeared in 1986, was a response to the new influences, and claimed to be different from previous manuals of professional practice. In many ways the actual practices described have not changed all that much from those which were common in previous times. It was the standpoint that had changed, and with that standpoint a profound change in attitudes and values – changes in techniques as well, which are derived from newly evaluated goals and objectives. The new edition has to assimilate more, and perhaps even more profound, changes of attitude and perception, since it has to accommodate the new ideas of what might be called the Thatcher period together with the rapid march of the new technologies. Its aim is to reassess the theory and practice of archives and records management, viewing them from the standpoint of processors and suppliers of information, as part of a developed and effective information management service, operating within the constraints and with the declared objectives that are acceptable in the modem world.

In 1986, the information professions had recently adopted the concept of planned national information systems, in which the library, archives and documentation services would be developed integrally in accordance with a national plan: Jamaica was taken as an example of how this would operate in the relatively simple structures of a small country.¹⁹ In accordance with this development plan, the Jamaica Archives Service had instituted a large-scale records management system.²⁰ This was based on a capacious records centre in central Kingston, with a staff of records analysts who would, with a network of clerical support, manage the records produced in the various government ministries. In developing countries, records management of this kind is particularly valuable, since not only does it economize on resources, but it renders useful the information that is locked up in the files (often the unmanageable and irretrievable files) of government departments.²¹ At the same time, the libraries which had been developed by specialist ministries were being built up to include technical documentation services. To an outsider it was strikingly obvious that the lack of close co-ordination between these two developments, records management and the specialized documentation centres, was a considerable drawback. The scheme would be vastly improved if these two strands could be brought together and a common reporting channel set up. The umbrella under which this could be done would inevitably be labelled information management.

Since that time, the lessons to be learnt from early attempts at integrated national information planning have become clearer, and we have been able to refine our view of what roles these services should play in society. The experience of Jamaica has now been extended, in one way or another, to many other countries and situations. Soon after the appearance of the first edition of this book, the establishment of what is now the International Records Management Trust (IRMT), brought about the large-scale Management of Public Sector Records in Commonwealth Countries Project.²² This influential project, backed by a number of development-aid funding organizations (including the United Nations) in different countries, has led to significant new developments and has provided a clear model for extension to new areas of the world.

The work of the trust has enabled us also to clarify our ideas about what the purpose and role of this area of work should be:

1. Good records management is a necessity for the successful working of a democratic state subject to the rule of law.
2. It underpins the rights and duties of citizens, holds governments and public authorities to account, facilitates development and makes the implementation of sound planning possible.

Archives form a necessary part of this work, and a toted records management view would be impossible without this aspect. This perspective on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Archival management in an information context
• 2 Archives services: their general nature, structure and function
• 3 Records management
• 4 Acquisition and archival appraisal
• 5 Archival arrangement
• 6 Archival description: general principles
• 7 The structure and form of data in archival descriptions
• 8 The organization of information in archival systems
• 9 Computing for archival management
• 10 Access and use: facilities and restrictions
• Bibliography
• Index