Digital Records Management

The first article, “Records Management in a Digital World,” gives an overview of the objectives, benefits, and weaknesses of electronic records management. There are numerous benefits to practicing good electronic records management, among them improving access for either employees or customers, preserving a record of your institution, and maintaining evidence of business activity. Additionally, it is important to know which records should be retained for future use and which records to be disposed of. Setting up clear guidelines delineating the disposition of records can save a business or institution precious time and money. There is one weakness to records management systems that the authors note. As the author states, “The primary data and information systems employed by most institutions do not routinely and systematically fulfill the five major requirements of a record keeping system,” (Bantin 2002). While many systems are effective and work quite well, no one is a panacea.

Where Bantin gives an overview of various aspects of digital records management, Sherry Owen’s article “Electronic Document Management Systems: A Case Study”, takes us into a step-by-step process of what it is like to actually attempt to implement an electronic document management system (EDMS). Owens article perfectly illustrates some of the benefits and pitfalls enumerated previously by Bantin. I found it particularly helpful to be guided through the process by someone who has clearly been through it and done it successfully. While Bantin provided the groundwork, Owens actually took us through the process and made it seem real.

The third reading, “The Benefits of Electronic Records Management Systems: A General Review of Published and some Unpublished Cases” (Johnston and Bowen 2005), reiterated many of the points listed above, but expands upon them by relating specific statistics highlighting the benefits of an EDMS. While it appears the benefits in cost are difficult to quantify, the article clearly gives the impression that each business that implemented one is happy with its performance, and at least internally believes they have made many cost savings. The three articles together outlined an entirely new application for me, digital records management. I now feel well versed in the theory and practical benefits of instituting such a system.

Question: The three articles have predominantly positive views of electronic records management systems. Taking a more critical view, what are some more potential pitfalls to digitizing records? Anything the authors may have glossed over?

References

1. Bantin, Philip C (2002). “Records Management in a Digital World”. EDUCAUSE, Research Bulletin, 2002(16). http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERB0216.pdf

2. Owen, Sherry (2006). “Electronic Document Management Systems: A Case Study”. Arkansas Libraries, 63(1). 22-25.

3. Johnston, Gary P. and Bowen, David V, (2005). “The Benefits of Electronic Records Management Systems: A General Review of Published and some Unpublished Cases”, Records Management Journal, Vol. 15 Iss 3, pp. 131-140.

Mooers’ Law and Today’s Information Retrieval Systems

This week’s readings focus on information retrieval systems and why some are used and some are not. The lecture given by Calvin Mooers in 1959 gives us perspective on the efficacy of different retrieval systems. The speech he gave was so influential that librarians and information specialists still refer to and use Mooers’ Law in their everyday work. It states, “An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it,” (Mooers, 1960). This poses an intriguing quandary for a librarian. How does one go about getting the end user just the right amount of information, and what is so painful and troublesome about information retrieval systems?

The following two readings jump ahead 50 years to focus on two forms of retrieval systems in use today. Google has of course been wildly successful as a search engine on the world wide web. The article explains the method Google uses to collect and rank the results when it receives a search query. I thought it interesting that Google uses many computers to work on one search query at the same time, thus saving the time it would take for one very large, very powerful computer to sift through the same amount of data. The question I kept on coming back to has to deal with Mooers Law though. How is Google so very successful when really their rankings are based on popularity, and there is no real way to discern if one’s search results are all that valuable?

The final article describes the catalog system that the library at North Carolina State University has been attempting to implement and make more user friendly. What makes the system they were developing noteworthy is that they were moving beyond the system as application model, and moving towards the system as platform model (Sierra, Ryan, and Wust 2007). Essentially, this means that instead of having a catalog that is static and unchanging, it could be reprogrammed by outside users, more adaptable to changing environments, and ultimately more versatile. If libraries are going to compete with Google and other popular search engines, and also stay competitive in the ongoing internet battle for attention, these are the kind of steps that are going to have to be made. It is encouraging to see the NCSU programmers attempting to make their systems compatible with mobile devices as well, as that is clearly the direction the end user is taking us. Google has certainly seemed to have muzzled Mooer of late, and it’s up to librarians to see if they can do the same.

Question for class: What aspects of the Google search engine helps it avoid the pitfalls expressed in Mooers’ Law?

References

1. Mooers, C.N. (1960). Mooers’ Law or, Why Some Retrieval Systems Are Used and Others Are Not.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 1996 vol: 23 iss: 1 (via ProQuest Database)

2. Cutts, M. (2005). “How Does Google Collect and Rank Results?” Google’s Newsletter for Librarians. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0512_01.html

3. Sierra, T., Ryan J., and Wust, M. (2007). Beyond OPAC 2.0: Library Catalog as Versatile Discovery Platform. Code4lib. Available at http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10/comment-page-1

Kochtanek, Matthews and Hirshon: Technology and Library Information Systems

Of the two readings, Kochtanek and Matthews (K & M) serves as a succinct survey of the development of Library Information Systems (LIS), principally over the past 50 years. It also gives a background on the accompanying technologies and other platforms that have developed along the way. Where K & M leave off, Hirshon’s well-written article, "Environmental Scan", takes us from where we stand now and shows us where the various technologies will lead us, and what the impact on the field and our society will be.

K & M traces the origins of the first library systems and follows that thread as it leads to the development of integrated library systems, online databases, web-based resources, digital library collections and e-books and e-journals. As they explain this rather detailed and complicated history, they offer broader backdrops to give context to these evolutions by naming the three stages of library automation and also the four eras of development of integrated library systems. One cannot discuss these without mentioning the technologies that sprang up along with them, and the article deals with hardware, software, and telecom developments, and goes into detail how the rise of the World Wide Web has brought many, if not all, of these disparate applications together. As the authors state, “Each of these application areas has had a different gestation and development period, the web as an access and distribution medium has served to weld these back together at the seams” (Kochtanek and Matthews, p.9).

The most gripping portion of Hirshon’s essay “Environmental Scan” is in the introduction where he cites the work of two futurists, Paul Saffo and Raymond Kurzweil. Saffo explains the pitfalls of trying to forecast the future, and, as Hirshon summarizes, “it is not the pace, but the simultaneity and cross-impact of curves that will make a forecast inaccurate,” (Hirshon, p. 3). Indeed, envisioning the future would seem like a fool’s errand, but that is exactly what Kurzweil attempts to do. He posits that the discovery rate of new technologies is on a dramatic uphill curve, and that the curve will only grow steeper over time. This leads him to make such claims as, “in another 15 years your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging,” (Hirshon, p.4). This is the age we are in, and Hirshon uses the futurist backdrop to navigate us through five areas in which technology will change the operations of the library in the near future: societal and economic issues, technological issues, education and learning issues, information content issues, and library leadership and organizational issues. Each of these articles lay the basic groundwork from which to understand where library information systems have come from and where they are going. For the novice entering the field, the two articles are indispensable.

My question for the group is whether they think Mullen Library falls under the bleeding edge, leading edge, in the wedge, or trailing edge category that K & M mention in terms of adapting to new technologies? Or, for the students who work in other local libraries, where do they think the library they work in falls?

References

Kochtanel and Matthews (2002). Ch 1. The evolution of LIS and enabling technologies. In Library Information Systems; Libraries Unlimited.

Arnold Hirshon (2008). “Environmental Scan: A report on trends and technologies affecting libraries.” NELINET, Inc. Retrieved from blackboard.cua.edu.