Fewer and fewer offices rely on secretaries, who once were responsible
for filing incoming letters, and keeping notes, working documents and
carbon copies of outgoing correspondence, thereby ensuring that they
were managed properly.  And the permanently valuable portions preserved
for posterity.  Instead, employees create their own records on computers
and are responsible for saving (or not saving) them within document
management systems or on folders on servers.  Or on hard drives.  Or
flash drives.

In the old days, long time secretaries really knew the ins and outs of
offices and functions and the best ones maintained paper files really
well.  Go to NARA now to do research in older permanent records and you
can find some real gems in terms of organization, filing, etc.  And in
well maintained paper files, it is easy to see the logical relationships
between the different documents and files in a long series.  Do most of
you feel that electronic record keeping is capturing those logical
relationships as well?  Record keeping now is more dependent on you, the
records managers, and on the creators of the records.  The secretaries,
the old third party buffers, have started disappearing.

Now that the secretaries are disappearing, do you find that you are
having to take over more of their roles in terms of understanding the
ins and outs of offices?  Or are we writing off some of the ability to
relate discrete pieces of information to each other, except when good
search terms can be used?  Do you find that you have to dig deeper to
understand how your organizations work and how the parts fit together,
when files are kept on servers or in document management systems?  Are
you now more dependent than in the past on proper use of thesaurus
terms, on the choice of descriptive terms in filling out fields in
document management systems, etc?

When presented with a court subpoena for document production, you face
different challenges than people did in the past.  In the old days, your
lawyers would ask you and the secretaries and file clerks to help find
the responsive documents.  Now, its up to you and the people managing
the electronic documents.  How confident are you in those processes?
Just wondering how that part of the transition looks to most of you.

Maarja

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance