Digging out from a very good meeting in Minneapolis today but in conjunction
with both this note and the earlier thread on email, I'm of two minds: 

1. Traditional records management argues that it's better to spend the time,
energy, and effort at the front end of the process in order to save time,
energy and effort at the back end. In other words, keep what you need to as
long as you need to, but then get rid of it. That's a best practice and of
course I wholly support it. It also goes along with Robert Williams' point
about the materials management-based origin of paper records management
(which I think is true but insufficient on its own - maybe much more later
after I finish my MARA work for the week).

2. However, the archivist makes a point (and one that has been raised before
on this list). Given advances in search technology, the ability to index
most text-type documents, the availability of and capability to search
metadata from many sources including intrinsic, structured (traditional data
entry/metadata model-based), and unstructured (tagging), and the
ever-decreasing cost of storage, it is not always straightforward to make
the case for paying at the front end because of the potential costs at the
back end. Moreover, there have been some cases recently, not a lot of them,
but some, that call into question the legitimacy (from the court's point of
view) of allowing employees to make decisions about what to keep and what to
discard. I want to stress that I am not making a judgment in favor of this,
merely reporting what I've seen in all of the legal blogs and Twitter posts
from lawyers about decisions. 

So given those two things, I'm not sure I'm surprised at the archivist's
response. I think it will be interesting to see what other feedback y'all
have and that come from other sources. 

Thoughts?

Respectfully submitted on behalf of myself alone and no other company,
organization, association, entity, or board of directors,

Jesse Wilkins, CRM
[log in to unmask] 
(303) 574-0749 direct
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jessewilkins 

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