Glenn's effigy is being burnt at the altar of the great archive and
records god at this very moment by National Archives (and academic)
people.
But to the point. Both Miranda and Glenn make the valid point that
trying to explain the concept of a continuum model to the business
users is probably a waste of time (my spin of course). That is also my
experience as unless you are in an organisation with a healthy culture
of managing records - where people are concerned with the record now
and into the future - you are pretty much on a hiding to nothing (hey
if you are in such an organisation I envy you).
As Shepherd and Yeo note in their book "Managing Records: a handbook of
principles and practices" the two models are not incompatible. The
objection to the life-cycle model being that it reflects an
underdeveloped view of records management and deals to specifically
with practical detail - this later being what most of your business
users of the system will be interested in though.
Use the model (both) in your work for your planning and implementation
of your recordkeeping system. Build a system that is mostly hidden from
the user. That is build a system where they have to do the minimum
input to the recordkeeping side but get the maximum benefit out of
having a recordkeeping system available for their use over time and you
will be close to perfection as you can be.
If only it were so simple (if it were the IT guys would have flogged it
off to us by now)
John Dowling
Records Manager
Federal Government
Australia
List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
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