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Tony (and other colleagues who may be interested),

I first became aware of Keyword AAA when I started in my current post. The
previous records manager had already done a lot of work to develop it for
use within Parliament, so it was pretty much a fait accomplit when I arrived
two years ago. Since then I've started implementing it around Parliament
with a combination of training courses, one to one meetings and hard work
from staff in offices.

After my initial wariness, I personally quite like it. I think it has the
potential to save quite a lot of work creating new classification schemes
(especially if you buy it for use within an existing ERMS or as we do, use a
product called Term Tree to manage the thesaurus). I think the key is to not
expect too much of it. It works here (well, so far...) because we see it as
an overarching system that fits above offices' own filing systems. We've
added our own terms to it to suit Parliament (which probably wouldn't be
much use elsewhere because Parliament is so unique  - I'm thinking of terms
like Official Report (Hansard) and Public Legislation), and we also messed
with the terminology - we call the Keyword "Keyword 1", the Activity
Descriptor "Keyword 2", and the Subject Descriptor "Keyword 3". It also
should not be seen as a subject thesaurus - there are far better ways to
control subject descriptions. But as a relatively quick way to introduce a
function/activity approach to your records management programme it is
useful.

We're also creating Disposal Authorities on the model of the National
Archives of Australia's Administrative Functions Disposal Authority that
will link in with the Classification Scheme we've developed. Of course,
records managers in local govt now have your Disposal Schedule which builds
on a functional classification, and university records managers benefit from
The Study of the Records Lifecycle, which I believe is being reviewed. But
for anyone starting from scratch I can recommend Keyword AAA as a starting
point.

Paul