Dear colleagues:
 
Please ignore cross postings. 
 
I am wrapping up a review of an excellent new book by Julie McLeod and  
Catherine Hare, "Managing Electronic Records" for publication in the Records  
Management Journal.  Most of what I read and hear about at conferences  concerning 
electronic records has to do with the upstream aspects of ER --  theory, 
research, strategy, policy, planning, standards and best practices  related to ER. 
These are all topics essential to the implementation of  electronic records 
solutions; however, so are the downstream aspects of  implementation. 
Discussions of systems that have actually been implemented long  enough to do 
post-implementation assessments, develop some lessons learned and  identify and make 
system adjustments can be extremely invaluable assets to those  doing the 
implementations and to others externally in varying sectors and  internationally. 
 
I will be noting as one of its best contributions of this book, that it  
includes, 3 very well written case studies of actual electronic records  
implementations in the public and private sectors. I'd like to learn to what  extent 
this is a rather unique feature of this book because there is a dearth of  ER 
implementation cases versus people simply not taking the time to write such  
cases up for the literature, or an unwillingness to share such information  
because it is regarded as competitive in nature. While I've had the experience  
with private sector organizations indicating the latter, my general sense is  
that there simply aren't many cases out there to write about, even after 20  
years of discussions on the upstream aspects. 
 
Some off-list personal exchanges with educators and other authors in the  
field have confirmed this. I turn to the lists to put the same issue to  
colleagues more generally. I welcome on or off-list reactions and implementation  
citations.
 
Regards,

Rick Barry
_www.mybestdocs.com_ (http://www.mybestdocs.com/) 
Cofounder, Open  Reader Consortium
_www.openreader.org_ (http://www.openreader.org/) 

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