Questions addressed in this chapter

For the remainder of this book I shall attempt to put some ‘meat on the bones’ as far as the 10 principles of Records Management 2.0 are concerned. However, it should be noted that what follows is not intended as a definitive description of what each principle means; instead they collectively represent just a few of my own thoughts as to the implications of each principle and what they may mean for the nature of records management, combined with some suggested theoretical ways forward. It is quite conceivable that there are many other possible interpretations of each principle; what follows is

designed to provoke further thought and debate, not to be definitive.

Principle 1: Scalable to an (almost) infinite degree

The limiting factor when it comes to the scalability of records management is, largely, due to its reliance on the participation of records managers themselves. More specifically, it is the way in which records management has created systems and processes that place records managers at their heart and rely on them to establish the policies, update the standards or initiate the procedures. As we have seen, this is true whether we are talking about developing a file plan, maintaining a metadata schema or appraising records.

The IT community has discovered that there is another way, and that is to place a greater degree of trust in the users themselves. The concept of tagging information for resource discovery, based on user-defined folksonomies, is not only infinitely scalable, it actually gets more effective as more users participate.