The second “Technology Matters in Archives” column has been published, “Email: An Appraisal Approach.”
“For nearly a half-century, we in the archives, records, and information management professions have either taught our institutions and organizations, or been taught, that a record is a record, no matter the media or manner in which it is created. It is the informational value contained within the item that determines whether it is a record. If it is a record, we then need to identify the temporal value of that information to determine its lifecycle, that is how long it should be maintained and its final disposition, either destruction or accessioning to an archive. However, there still is significant pushback from our institutions’ desires to treat electronic or born digital records as something different from those that are paper-based and/or analog-born, and subsequently want to monolithically manage electronic/digital records’ lifecycles as a single record type…This problem exists throughout our organizations from our enterprise systems that manage human resources and financial data, to our shared drives, to the darkest and dankest quagmire of all, our email systems. Had Dante Alighieri been a records or information management professional in the twenty-first century, he may have assigned one level of his hell solely to email.” Join me as I discuss potential solutions for applying sound records management to email.
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