The answer is yes!!  If you're in the private sector, your organizations depend on you to keep up to date on technical issues and to ensure compliance with complex regulatory requirements.  As Norman puts it, your professional expertise is critical because you play a vital role as arbiter/liaison.  That's important, not just with IT, but with the creators and users of records within your organization.

If you're in the public sector, you also play an important role in preserving national memory.  Here are  two very different examples, one from 50 years ago, the second from 40 years ago.  Both were in the news yesterday.

(1) Look at how vivid records can be:  click on http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/rosa-parks/images/police-report-l.jpg or
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/rosa-parks/images/bus-diagram-l.jpg
and you'll see what I mean.  Beyond their use as source documents, the contemporary documents have an immediacy beyond the retrospective narrative they undergird (http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/rosa-parks/#documents).

(2) I was going to post this as a RAINDROP but it fits with why records managers exist.  See "Doubts on cause of Vietnam War buried in archives" at
http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051031/WIRE/51031013/1117/news.  The article refers to second hand sources so we'll have to wait and see if the study in question itself is released before we can see how the historian used contemporary records to piece together the internal study.

The article refers to documents from the 1960s.  A spokesman is quoted as saying the agency is working to declassify the raw materials that the historian used for his internal study.  (How long to wait, what to release, and when and how to release information from government archives are awfully tricky questions, way beyond the scope of this Listserv.  Your job is to preserve the records, lawyers and archivists and FOIA officers deal with the other issues.  So let's not get into that aspect of the article here  -- or any other tangential issues.)   Within the context of Recmgmt-L, the Vietnam story DOES remind us that agency records managers "existed" at the agency and were doing their jobs in preserving the 40-year old records described in the article.  Without records management, the records might have been destroyed long ago.

Maarja

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