Records Management for Museums and Galleries (eBook)

An Introduction

Charlotte Brunskill, Sarah Demb (Autoren)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2012 | 1. Auflage
278 Seiten
Elsevier Science (Verlag)
978-1-78063-291-9 (ISBN)

Infos

The systematic management of records is an important activity for 'information businesses' such as museums and galleries, but is not always recognized as a core function. Record keeping activities are often concentrated on small groups of records, and staff charged with managing them may have limited experience in the field.Records Management for Museums and Galleries offers a comprehensive overview of records management work within the heritage sector and draws on over a decade of experience in applying fundamental principles and practices to the specific circumstances of museums. It introduces readers to the institutional culture, functions, and records common to museums, and examines the legislative and regulatory environments affecting record-keeping practices. The book is comprised of eight chapters, including: a history of records keeping in the UK museum and gallery sector; the basics of records management; making a business case for records management; requirements of legislation for records management; how to conduct a records survey; strategy and action planning; how to develop a file plan, retention schedule and records management programme; and a guide to useful additional resources. - Gives practical and tested solutions to real world issues - Fills a gap in the literature as a handbook in this important sector - Provides an overview of the sector as a whole

Charlotte Brunskill is Archivist and Records Manager at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (sister institution to the Yale Centre for British Art). Before this, she spent seven years at the National Portrait Gallery where she was responsible for establishing, from scratch, a comprehensive records management and archive programme. Charlotte has published numerous articles and taught records management. She holds a Master's degree in Archive Administration and Records Management from University College London, UK.

Textauszug

2

Records management basics

Sarah R. Demb

Abstract:

Explores and defines the terms, concepts and ideas key to records management: records, records and information management, records life cycle, records continuum, archival management and records series. Outlines the benefits of records management.

Key words

evidence

records and information management

records life cycle

records continuum

archival management

records series

corporate asset

Introduction

Museums are information businesses. They exist to collect, generate, interpret and disseminate information about their collections, their social and historical contexts and wider trends in society. Information management addresses ownership of information within the organisation, intellectual property rights and policies/procedures regarding data, records and capture and dissemination systems. It encompasses all information, data and records created and managed by an institution. Records management is an important stream or subset of activities within this information environment. It enables museums to organise much of the information they hold. Records are corporate assets which should be maximised and protected.

Before implementing a records management programme, it is important to understand some basic definitions.

What is a record?

A record provides evidence of a transaction, activity, decision or event; it may need to be proven or referenced over the medium or long term1 and can exist in any format (e.g. paper, electronic, microfilm, magnetic and optical media, photographs, slides or other images). Thus records include paper correspondence, word-processed documents, text messages, e-mails, web forms, digital CCTV footage and audio and video recordings, to name a few examples.2

Records may have multiple values that can be characterised as:

 administrative or informational: records needed to carry out work on a daily basis by their creators or others

 evidential: records that provide proof over time of decisions made, transactions carried out and events which take place

 financial and legal: closely related to evidential value, ensuring compliance with finance and human resources regulations and legislative requirements related to a variety of subjects, including health and safety, freedom of information and data protection

 historical/research: some records have long-term value and are identified for permanent preservation because of their interest to future generations; the business or institutional archives of museums are often used by academics, genealogists, family historians and the museum itself.

It is also helpful to consider some of the characteristics of the record as identified by the British pioneer of archival management, Hilary Jenkinson, in the early part of the twentieth century, although it is worth noting that in a digital context some of them, such as neutrality and uniqueness, might not go unchallenged by today’s archivists.3

 Neutrality – records are a means and by-product of work, not the work itself, and therefore are impartial. Records are not created solely as evidence of work or for posterity, but as part of the processes necessitated by an organisation’s work. Therefore, they become impartial evidence of those processes.

 Authenticity – records are credible and reliable because they are created or received by staff as part of the documented business processes agreed by the organisation to carry out its work.

 Institutional provenance and context (robustness) – very few records stand on their own. They are a product of business processes and as such are interrelated. They tell the story of the work conducted by the organisation in a way that no single document could do and no secondary source could evidence. A robust record has a history that can be traced to its records series (described below) and ultimately to the records group, or fonds,4 of which it is a part. In the world of electronic records, explicit audit trails prove the robustness of the record.

 Uniqueness – the circumstances under which the record is created make it significant and unique.

What is records management?

Records management is the systematic process of implementing a set of tools and guidance that enable an organisation to locate and retrieve the right information in the right format by the right person at the right time at the lowest possible cost, with the least amount of effort (Wythe, 2004: 112), within the local legal and regulatory environment. More traditional definitions of the term incorporate the concept of the records life cycle, which is explained later in this chapter. The main tools used to implement records management are the policy, file plan and retention schedule (discussed in detail in Chapter 7).

Organisations such as museums benefit from implementing records management because it:

 increases efficiency by avoiding reliance on individual idiosyncrasies of organising information – records are organised according to a corporate/agreed structure and are therefore more readily available to staff

 saves time and money by ensuring that staff do not lose track of, recreate or store duplicate information

 ensures that corporate memory is retained, so that staff transitions do not necessitate ‘reinventing the knowledge wheel’

 facilitates compliance with legislation because records are maintained as evidence of transactions and managed in accordance with statutory responsibilities

 protects and enhances an organisation’s reputation via the resulting audit trails which make the organisation more accountable and transparent – risk is managed in the understanding that a full record is kept on what information is held, where and by whom.

In other words, a lack of proper records management results in the following problems common across organisations:

 inability to locate records and information quickly and efficiently

 duplication of information (holding multiple copies of the same record)

 confusion about which person or post holds the official record

 confusion about what to keep, what to throw away and when to do so

 non-compliance with legal requirements related to records keeping, such as the FOIA and data protection statutes.

The ‘difference’ between archives and records management

Traditionally, an institutional archive comprises those materials created and received by an organisation in the course of everyday business that have been identified as having permanent value, whether for legal, evidential or research purposes. Without this designation (which should be assigned according to sector-standard processes and procedures – see Chapters 5 and 7), materials are not ‘archival’; they are merely inactive or possibly (but not always) old.

The exception that occurs in museums and other heritage organisations, such as libraries and stand-alone archives, tends to be collections documentation, which is continuously used for both the purpose for which it was originally created by those same creators and by others over time for research, and which has permanent archival value. Collections documentation such as accession files is therefore permanently active records.

Archival management standards and practice exist to ensure that records which have permanent value are arranged, described, catalogued, preserved and accessed over time.

The expanded second edition of the Society of American Archivists’ Museum Archives: An Introduction (2004) is a practical step towards redressing the not-so-benign neglect of archives. It is a widely known trope to characterise archive material or archives as ‘dusty’, due to the fact that there is a tendency to forget where the materials came from in the first place. ‘Dusty’ archives are those records that are of permanent value but that are not used and, almost more importantly, are unmanaged.

However, archives and records management are intricately linked. Records management principles are designed to help manage the records we create, receive, use and dispose of in day-to-day work across the myriad functions of organisations like museums. In the main, archival materials are used for purposes different to those for which they were originally created, even when the users are the same staff who created the records. Archival management, as detailed in Wythe’s volume (ibid.), outlines how...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.4.2012
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Hilfswissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Buchhandel / Bibliothekswesen
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Wirtschaftsinformatik
• ISBN-10: 1-78063-291-6 / 1780632916
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78063-291-9 / 9781780632919