Differences between Public and Private Records Management

Articles

Differences between Public and Private Records Management

By Joseph Andrew Settanni
Feb. 4, 2007

Records, writings and other related things, have been around for literally thousands of years. Of course, their multiplication and complexity, growth and convolutions, in terms of many different records media has substantially added to the information management challenge that exists today and far into the future. Data, raw and refined, contained in an enormous range of media, especially the increasing electronic kind, forces, pressures, people in businesses and governments to confront those great and intriguing challenges with more degrees of intelligence than ever before in recorded history.

And, one knows that, sooner or later, all records of whatever size, shape, kind or form must be coherently managed, meaning if the retained information is to be thus used correctly, effectively, and efficiently for a wide variety of present and future human needs and various achievements. However, every new media that has been developed has almost always been added to the general mix of recorded documentation; paper still exists; microfilm still is created; computerized records have not yet created the ever expected nirvana of a totally paperless office supposedly existing almost everywhere on the face of the earth.

It can be correctly stated that no major kind of records media has yet been declared as completely obsolete, totally unused, because of any newer media, digitized or not. Each medium of information, moreover, has been added easily to the crescive sum total of all the others, digitized or not. This is the contemporary reality of data and records in private and government offices. People, business leaders and bureaucrats, must utilize documents, paper and otherwise, for conducting business or running a governmental establishment of any kind. And, paper documents, of course, are not yet totally obsolete; nor, for that matter, is the assortment of different types of microforms.

Digitized records only seem to be fully replacing older media, though 95% of all current and future records will be digitized efforts, while paper records continue to proliferate. Fax machines, high-speed printers, home-based photographic copiers, and other devices produce mountains of paper documents that do not show signs of shrinking any time soon.

This looks at first like a paradox but it really isnąt. People still require different media to do many jobs, some of them are the same jobs that were done, e.g., by paper for many centuries now. The popular joke is that the paperless office will arrive only after toilet tissue is no longer required. So, paper remains a vital part of the information management situation and its reality without a doubt until, perhaps, some unforeseen revolutionary development might finally replace it, which is, nevertheless, highly doubtful.

Thus, paper and other media must and will be managed for some time to come, to say the least. Intelligence will, therefore, be critically demanded from both private businesses and governments concerning how and why information media will be handled for both private and public needs and purposes, benefits and ends.

Thinking about the management of records, its effective cognition, includes considering the various values that are possessed by them including matters pertaining to the administrative, audit, evidential, managerial, historical or archival values common to both private and public documents; but, public records cover the additional consideration of the political value inherent to public records that document the intimate lives of the people living under the various units of government, local, state and national.

What is called the appraisal of records, thus, goes beyond the simply transactional or functional aspects of the contained information presented in different media formats. The public or political value of records, meaning when solely held by governments, increases the meaning given to the appraisal of them because of the implications of both creating and safeguarding such things for the citizenry.

Although, of course, there are many similarities between private and public, meaning governmental, organizations/agencies, the differences will be here critically highlighted so that the differences will enlighten those who are not normally familiar with them. The quality of the information contained in documentary form, regardless of media type, will be used to explain the noted differences. Many kinds of records are held by both private individuals and companies as well as units of government, of course.

Public records, however, carry obligations, some much greater obligations, well beyond the limits of almost all private records or documents. This is because such matters as the rights and liberties of citizens are at stake in perpetuity in terms of free governments especially, meaning those regimes not thought to be authoritarian or totalitarian in nature. Governments, properly understood, maintain their records both for their own institutional needs and for the general public, inclusive of taxpayers and everybody else. A public document is a public trust. The custodians of those records are and must be held accountable for their access and preservation, reference and storage, meaning also especially those records that are of a permanent/historical or archival nature.

Before about the middle of the 20th century, it can yet be interestingly noted, most businessmen were not really acquainted with the intricacies and realities of integrated or full-scale records management programs taken in a professional sense. Even governments had to learn the realities involved -- and more and more quickly at that.

Mainly, it was the ever increasing growth of government regulations and their implications in demanding more data, the ever mounting quantity of records accumulated by business activities, and the recognized need for improved and more information generation for handling ever more complex business problems. And, consequently, all across the country and throughout the world there was the recognition that something had to be done to control and manage the tremendous avalanche of records held and rapidly accumulating in offices, both private and public.

Today, of course, professional records management is regarded as an integral part of truly effective and efficient administration in many organizations. There exists such organizations as the Association of Records Managers and Administrators International and the Association for Information and Image Management , among many others, to help educate and provide various means of requisite and needed training for records management professionals of many kinds.

The Institute of Certified Records Managers exists to provide a Certified Records Manager (CRM) designation to those who wish to pass a series of tests along with a set of qualifications for then being given the highly coveted CRM designation as a sign of continuing professional commitment and resolute dedication. There are currently less than 1,000 active CRMs in the entire world. Records, in addition, have been raised, moreover, in the national consciousness because of the business fiascoes of Enron, Arthur Anderson, etc. The importance of records, therefore, ought now to be undoubted by any rational human being aware of complex business and governmental realities.

The loss of records, for instance, to a private company can be a grave matter to that organization but not as important a loss as would be those various public records denominated as vital records, meaning, as examples, birth, death, divorce, and marriage certificates. A vast number of public records are ever intimately involved with peopleąs lives, not just abstract informational stuff.

Good public records programs must exist to insure that a wide variety and number of documents are kept, made easy to reference, stored properly, and archived permanently when justified by their historical and other value to society and governmental purposes.

The records program, as is similar to private business concerns, is supported by records retention and disposition schedules, including a vital records protection program. The vital records, also known as essential records, are those designated as such because their loss would destroy a business or the functioning of a governmental agency; these would be properly noted on the records schedules as to their added importance.

The point is that whatever it takes to use, retain, and preserve records ought to be done both for the sake of an institution as to its existence and, for governments, to protect and maintain the integrity of records for the sake of the people who constitute a municipality, county, province, state, region, or an entire country. Private businesses may come and go but a government claims to last forever, at least in theory.

Although replevin, the legal demand that can be placed upon parties to return an institutionąs records, is a right of both private and public institutions, governments can and do claim in law that their records are not alienable from their corporate bodies. This means that anyone found with an original record that a government, for instance, deems of permanent or historical value must, under law, return it to that government body, even if it was purchased in a supposedly legal manner.

Such a document was never meant to be sold, meaning alienated, from that government in the first place, so it could not, de jure, be ever sold to anyone legally speaking. Such government documents are, therefore, fully capable of always being replevened even if not of any permanent significance because of it being, under law, inalienable.

The loss or destruction of private records can have unfortunate consequences for owners of businesses or for individuals, of course; but, when public records are lost or destroyed the results can be dire for generations to come in terms of the loss of information vital to the very survival of nations. While both kinds of records can be managed in the same kinds of ways, however, the presumption is that added precautions are much more logically due to the safety and security of public records. Information, of course, can be contained upon a wide variety of possible media, paper, microforms, and digital media of many types.

The last named presents the greatest difficulty because software and hardware changes are coming more and more rapidly and, moreover, with an ever increasing proliferation of many media sources. And, people increasingly demand a more media rich environment in which and through which they communicate on many levels. The same digital source could include fixed visual images, video, audio, and text in various combinations. This situation, of course, is true for both private and public entities that both receive and create information sources, data and various kinds or records.

A greater challenge is faced by the governmental institutions that must both try to provide access to the records while, at the same time, protecting both the privacy and rights and liberties of the citizens. It is becoming an ever greater balancing act with ever newer complications as people tend to demand more of both directions, the protection aspects and the open government parts of the overall equation.

Where many of the limits of responsibility of businesses or firms may end toward their stock holders, officers and employees, at the point, one begins to see how much larger the obligations of public bodies have and will crescively become well into the future.

Those governments that try to stay at the cutting edge of technology regarding records management policies, programs, technologies, and systems will be able, therefore, to properly service its citizens far into the future when digitized records will basically become the main means of retaining records for the citizenry.

The way that governments chose to conduct business has been affected by degrees of technology and what has been called the electronic revolution -- for good reason; such records present challenges in terms of capturing, utilizing, preserving, managing, storing, and making them accessible as electronic records in various formats. Of course, one can figure out that great quantities of critical electronic data have been lost forever, as is true about the loss to history through unrecorded telephone conversations.

As computer-based systems increasingly generate and store records as public documents or data, the political establishment must face the challenge of taking care of these public digital assets. Why? Many such records are literally critical to the functional survival of a governmentąs history and culture, infrastructure and administration, retained in the daily conduct of government business.

The long-term preservation of digital records is usually difficult because of the extremely rapid change of electronic-based technology; it has been estimated by various consulting and other businesses that about every two years both computing power and storage density doubles.

This has many implications. The computer technology, thus, changes again and again into forms of hardware and software that are no longer compatible with earlier generations of such things. The five-inch floppy diskette will eventually be joining the punch cards of yesteryear. As an added complication, however, the older software, being nearly always proprietary, is mostly no longer supported by the company that originally had produced it, assuming the firm still exists at all. In addition, to add to the formidable problems, the media containing the data is written on things that will and do decay over time, including the CDs, DVDs, hard drives, magnetic tapes, etc.

Therefore, such degrading media logically must be replaced if the information stored on that media is to be still effectively and correctly retained. There are usually two ways to go; either try to studiously preserve the original hardware, software and media or convert the record to what is called an open file format so that the data can participate in media migration to later forms of updated or improved software. As can be seen, governments and private entities have a difficult task to perform if they wish to succeed in saving the past for the future in terms, ultimately, of the records of civilization.

Digitized information created or received by any level of government today will be have to be made available to those people generations from now who will be living in a much different cyberspace reality; only those governments, therefore, that maintain the ability to improve their records technology, policies, programs and systems and related efforts will be able to properly and effectively accommodate the complex future needs of many diverse techno-publics.

Fortunately, standards exist to help deal with electronic records issues such as: DOD (Department of Defense) 5015.2-STD, the Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications, ISO (International Standards Organization) 15489, the new international standard for records management, ISO 23081-1:2006 Information and Documentation - Records Management Processes - Metadata for Records - Part 1: Principles, ISO 177799 Cyber-Security Best Practice Standard, The Sedona Principles: Best Practices Recommendations & Principles for Addressing Electronic Document Production, etc..

Moreover, one easily could do a good compilation of contemporary software product criteria as properly applied to: Electronic Records Management (ERM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and Electronic Document Management (EDM); all of ERM, ECM, and EDM is appropriately applicable for either small, mid-sized, or , of course, multinational companies throughout the entire world; all, as an added point, are also truly useful and effective for vertical business markets, besides the needs of governments as well.

As an appropriate necessity, there is an increasing convergence of the various functionalities of all three of these noted technologies that is, in fact, extremely rapidly occurring. More to the point, it can be readily said that ECM substantially covers over 95% of the criteria for electronic records handling, storage, etc.; this is because, logically speaking, it includes all of ERM and almost all of EDM activities, systems, and processes.

One factor that has logically lead, thus, to the continuing convergence of such interrelated technologies has been digitization, inclusive of visual images. The process of converting paper or microfilm documents into digital images capable of being seen or called up on a computer screen is known as document imaging. Thus, documents can be scanned as either black and white, called bi-tonal, or in color. It is best to scan bi-tonal images at a minimum of 200 dots per inch (DPI) and 300 DPI is needed for such oversized documents as maps and engineering drawings.

The process of using a software program to convert scanned images to text yielding the ability to search for a documentąs words is referred to as optical character recognition (OCR). Consequently, scanning at 300 DPI is recommended for achieving good OCR results. Besides paper media, microforms can be scanned and digitized for use in document management systems or, also, for web utilization purposes.

An important point to note is that film image quality, in some cases, is much worse than the original paper copy and, as a result, higher resolution scanning may be necessary or, at times, the use of grayscale, meaning 16 shades of black and white, may be employed when effectively required to thus improve results.

Color scanning is, sometimes, necessary to save information that is represented through use of color for such things as pie charts, highlighting features, etc. Since this matter of color digitization/scanning captures more image information, proper results can occur at 150 to 200 DPI. The additional information retained in color produces larger file sizes, and there should be concern taken to make sure that sufficient storage is made to exist. There are, of course, a number of manifest and positive benefits offered by document imaging.

A maximum of about 15,000 pages, which would be, e.g., equivalent to having a four-drawer filing cabinet of documents, can be put onto a single CD-ROM disc or up to 70,000 images placed upon a single DVD-ROM disc. These imaged documents are indexable so that one can search an index field, such as birth date, name, Social Security number, address, telephone number, etc., and, moreover, locate the particular document needed in mere seconds. Documents can be simultaneously accessed by multiple users for quick access and can, in addition, be effectively deployed by the internet for enhanced customer service purposes.

Paper records can also be easily changed to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files that can be properly viewed by various computer types, inclusive of PC, MAC, Linux, etc. in any web browser allowing documents to be available from any place on earth. There are, moreover, major customer service and cost savings logically made much more attainable when record/document imaging is used in a truly effective and efficient manner.

The future of the 21st century will, moreover, expect to see ever more progressive applications of these many above noted positive and interesting technologies and many others, not yet presently conceived of, within both the private and public sectors and, moreover, on an international basis as well. The future of records is vitally coexistent with the records of the future as just a simple -- but greatly revolutionary -- truism.

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About the author: Joseph Andrew Settanni is a new contributor to Useless Knowledge.

Email: mkeegan311@earthlink.net

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