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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