Dear all

Forgive yet another Australian intrusion onto your list, but I've been
examining various specifications (in addition to writing some) for a while.
There is quite a bit of difference between the US and UK specs.  Our
Australian specs are nearer the UK model than the US.  There are a few areas
of major difference.

The first and most significant difference is in the level of aggregation at
which the records management controls are invoked.  In Australian and UK
practice (ie the PRO spec) the controls are applied at folder level.  In the
US specification the controls are attributed to record categories (perhaps
also known as records series if such a thing exists in the electronic
world).  What this means is that the level of process controls (access,
disposal, classification etc) in US is at this higher level and not at the
folder/item level.  I think that applying controls at the lower level of
aggregation (folder/item) makes the UK/Aus approach better for actively
managing the processes of creation and management of items, whereas the US
approach is more about managing groups of folders/items.  This is a
substantial difference.  In the ideal future, we'd have both levels of
aggregations being managed, with the UK/Aus approach being nested to a
category/series.  The category/series would then need some different types
of controls to be defined to manage things like inheritance from different
systems and perhaps migration, and even some grosser level of disposal (ie
all the files from the order processing series)

Use of the fileplan (dreadful name and I'd have some suspicions about its
proprietary origins!).  In US and UK there is a set of requirements that
link the allocation of file/folder numbers to the levels of the hierarchy
defined in the classification scheme (aka file plan).  Thus meaningful
numbers where the number equates to a concept or term are allowed. Most
Australian stuff discourages this approach as, from experience, it ends up
being difficult to update and can fossilise.  The fileplan in the Aus/UK
approaches is about applying controls on what titling can be applied to
records, an approach which the higher level of aggregationin the US
precludes.  Thirdly the fileplan in all specs then enables the linking of
security/access and disposal controls.  Personally I'd argue (as I do with
no avail in Australia!) that what we need is different things - one is a
functional analysis tool which manages the definition of the functional
terms, the mandates etc.  From that authoritative analysis, various other
control tools need to hang - the language control (file titling), the
security/access classification schemes, links to organisational
structures/people/roles, the disposal schedule.  They all link, but making
one tool (called the fileplan-yuk) do all these things is too much and makes
for muddiness in thinking and difficulty in getting particularly good
implementation.  Naturally this latter bit is my personal opinion to be
disregarded in the analysis of the differences.

Process orientation: The specifications all have significant numbers of
processes associated with records and there is a basic uniformity on what
they are (bearing in mind earlier comments on level of application).  When
we hit metadata requirements, however, we are at another point of
difference.  The US model doesn't really have a metadata standard as such
associated with it, but does list metadata items required.  Only in the
definition of how attribution/review of vital records status and in
applying/upgrading/changing the security levels are process metadata items
defined.  Similarly in the UK metadata specification, the process elements
are best articulated in the internal/external access processes.  Access
processes are just one of the recordkeeping processes that should maintain
metadata about themselves (records of recordkeeping transactions should be
managed as records).  Australian metadata sets are increasingly taking a
more complex view of recordkeeping metadata to enable them to define all the
records processes as well as the initial creation metadata (profile metadata
if you like).

I think that these are the major areas of difference and the most
significant of these is the different layers of aggregation to which the
controls are attributed.

regards

Barbara Reed
Recordkeeping Systems Pty Ltd
Ph: 61 2 9369 2343