Archives threatened by Y2K syndrome

The millennium bug is not the only digital problem looming. ADAM GIFFORD finds that records management is coming down with a similar malaise.

While the world is putting a huge amount of effort and money into fixing the year 2000 computer bug, another digital mess is lurking.

"There's a lot of commonality between Y2K and electronic records management," says Rick Barry, a former chief of information services at the World Bank who now advises Government and private organisations around the world on how to cope with the information tsunami sweeping over them.

Speaking after a seminar in Auckland, Mr Barry said that both Y2K and electronic records were based in technology that produced information. "Both are expensive to fix. Both have been around for a long time. We haven't done anything about them and now we're getting blind-sided by them."

He said archivists had been calling for four-digit year fields for years but were not listened to.

Y2K has finally got the attention of senior management and those controlling budgets, but electronic records management has not. Indeed, organisations are diverting money away from efforts to improve records management to respond to Y2K.

Mr Barry said organisations needed to understand the risks and rewards of managing the data generated by digital devices and processes.

"Virtually every digital system produces records which can be called in evidence: email, word processing, these new ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems [and] Web pages all produce records.

"But if they're not being managed as records by the organisation, it can be said the organisation does not have a trustworthy record-keeping system. When attorneys can demonstrate the record-keeping system is not trustworthy, they can demonstrate the case that the organisation they are attacking is not trustworthy."

The risk was highlighted in a case involving the United States National Archivist, who was found to have broken the law by directing Government agencies to destroy electronic data once they had made a paper copy.

"It was proved in court that sometimes an electronic record has more contextual information which does not come out in the printed copy. Agencies have to maintain the electronic copy as well."

On the other hand, companies can get significant competitive advantage by treating the knowledge in their systems as a corporate asset.

Mr Barry uses a newspaper weather page to show the difference between data, information and knowledge. Data is the raw temperatures and barometric pressures. When that data is compiled into maps, it becomes information. When someone draws on that information to make a forecast or issue a weather warning, it becomes knowledge.

"Wise managers are saying, `Are we really treating our intellectual assets as capital or are we treating them as a cost to be got rid of?' When the most experienced people go out the door that's where you are losing the greatest knowledge. It may be fine to do that if you have a way to capture that knowledge, but most people don't."

Some of Mr Barry's writings on record-keeping issues can be found at www.rbarry.com.