I'm glad Peter decided to get involved!
I'd been thinking that the Microsoft package was more likely to be for
personal use. Private individuals (unless they are archivists or Records
Managers!) are unlikely to have formal appraisal skills, but might have an
eye to preserving their electronic documentation for posterity. Therefore,
isn't a tool like MyLifeBits going to be helpful to us archivists when it
comes to ensuring that relevant personal documents about, e.g. writers,
researchers, scientists, survive? Better than, as was cheekily suggested at
Conference this year, doorstepping the grieving relatives at the funeral tea
to make sure the deceased's hard drive is considered for the archives as
well as their notebooks and paper correspondence.
Peter's points about the timing and place of appraisal in the life cycle of
records make me wonder whether we are cutting off our noses by segregating
the teaching of Archive Administration and Records Management on the Archive
courses. I'm an archivist through and through - I've never wanted to be a
Records Manager - but I'm glad that we had a module on RM/Modern Records
Management on the course. Archivists need to be as aware of what happens
during the current and semi-current life of records as Records Managers do
of what will happen to the records they manage once they cease to be
semi-current. Knowledge of what makes an archive could help Records Managers
schedule and appraise the records in their care, and knowledge of the
progression of records through their life cycle could help Archivists
structure the catalogue when those records become archives (particularly in
a Local Government context). Or should we stop cataloguing hierarchically,
as this is also something that only means anything to us as a profession? :P
Jan Hargreaves
Lancashire Record Office
27 Nov 2002
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