> From: Elizabeth Cousins <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: THE GREATEST ARCHIVE CONTEST
> 
> Hugh, Check out Curarium.com and the 3ll collection (Digital Archive of Japan) 

I checked out both but I found the Curarium too confusing. The first rule of an Archive should be a structured organization to make searching for things of interest a simpler task.  The Digital Archive of Japan did have that organization.  I thought their Map Collection was very interesting since they demanded that maps be redone on a cyclic basis so it has a real benefit in tracking societal growth and also artistic style.

Just as the records manager organizes, and protects the documents of an organization to provide legal protection and governance of the records collections, archives provide an electron microscope view of a piece of society, or a culture or elements of a culture ( art work, music ) that reflects the drivers in that society.

Archives allow cross section tracking of elements of our society.  For example the music of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart are tremendously different from the music of today.   Just as art has evolved or devolved.  It seems over time mankind seems to worship a breakdown in music and art. Impressionism was a slow fade away from the realism of earlier work. Then works like Picasso or Pollock are a total breakaway from realism. You could say, some art has trended away from an appreciation of God’s creations to man’s deluded view of creation.

Has records management evolved such that the orderly collection of documents stored under all sorts of classifications ( by year, by class: legal, HR, accounting) and now is stored in the Cloud with all sorts of breakdowns in the classification process. (IT stores its data in chaos. They are the “Jazz" of records management.) Storing email for example is a worthless class; as there is no organization other than the day, month and year. So records management has followed the Chaos theory of music, art and records managers, now attempt to use Information Governance to return some order to records management.

But it seems that each time records managers seek to embrace some new terminology for what they do: Information Manager, Knowledge Manager, Information Governance Manager, et al. that they cede a part of the turf to fractions that seek to claim part of the field.

Realism works in music, art, writing and records management. If there is no recognizable structure, then there is no records management.


Hugh Smith
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