Jim Mullen wrote:
>I believe that spending the time and $ up front to manage would
decrease the cost and risk on the back end.

Absolutely, Jim - its going to cost you somewhere at some point.
Treating records in any media solely as a "capture everything because
storage is cheap" issue means you are ultimately going to spend the
money after the fact to clean up a lot of garbage. As you point out,
garbage doesn't just go away, and to eliminate it, you have to follow
the rules whether you want to or not.  A lot more value is added when
those rules are applied up front; hardly any value is added cleaning up
garbage. 

I actually think there are a lot of analogies between what these types
of articles say about electronic records, and how microfilm was often
misused in its heyday. In both cases, the given technology has been
applied because storage of it is perceived as cheap, and since the
storage problem is "solved", so is the records problem. In both cases,
the stated solutions are seen as avoiding retention issues by people
with little or no understanding of how those policies can be applied
effectively in the real world. Both touted the latest computer
technology (such as CAR) as making basic records identification needs
obsolete. Oh, and they are both "paperless" - a marketing point used
repeatedly to declare "paper based" records management concepts no
longer relevant. In the case of Multnomah County, microfilm - the
"latest technology" - was extensively used in the 60's and 70's, and
justified in exactly this manner. The stuff was cranked out, with poor
processing techniques, and little if any indexing. Scotch tape was a
commonly used splicing technique. 

By the time I started in the county, it was spending $125K per year to
produce this stuff. Within the first year, I eliminated $100K of that.
For the past 15+ years, we've been spending $10K - $15K per year
identifying/weeding/inspecting/repairing this film, of which we have
over 20K rolls. That's just the straight preservation processing costs,
and doesn't include labor. None of this would have been necessary if the
records issues had been dealt with as a matter of records management
policy/practice, instead of as an issue of "cheap storage" or "keep
everything". I've seen similar issues arise with legacy electronic
systems, with significantly greater dollar amounts involved.

BTW, this whole landfill thing seems to have a certain resonance with
me. One of the first record centers I worked in was located in an old
municipal incinerator building that was used to burn garbage. Across the
street from that facility was the city's landfill at the time. The
current records center I manage is located on top of an old landfill. 

There seems to be some kind of cosmic message in all of this, but I'm
not sure I want to know what it is!

Dwight Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Fleet, Records, Electronics, Distribution and Stores
(FREDS)
1620 S.E. 190th Avenue
Portland, OR 97233
Phone: (503)988-3741
Fax: (503)988-3754
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