Cross
Currents No 2 June 2001
A
digest of cross sectoral information management events, issues and ideas in
organisations, libraries, archives and museums, with special emphasis on
arts and the humanities.
Bruce
Butterfield offers the
following advice on strategic planning in a chapter from the American Association of
Association Executives' publication Professional Practice in Association
Management, available on Forbes Group website
Step
1, strategic thinking. Must use member-needs research to judge how well the
association or group meets fitness tests on standards, current needs and
future needs, external and internal environmental scans, including assessments
of structure, culture and resources.
Step
2, strategic planning. Must focus on meeting core member or customer needs, be
a process not an event, be continuous, address outcomes, be based on research,
not opinions of the few, be done by small groups with large group input. The
plan should be a set of priorities, be achievable, measurable and time
sensitive, be flexible and responsive to changing conditions, be a unit not a
menu, be a means to an end, not an end in itself, and be based on a three year
period.
Step
3 is strategic implementation, involving the use of programs, procedures and
budgets, and Step 4 is evaluation and feedback. Poor planning leads to lack of
organisational memory; lack of organisational definition; budget driven
decisions rather than needs driven decisions, crises driven management,
shifting priorities, membership restlessness and dissatisfaction. Website: http://www.forbesgroup.com/.
The
National Office of the Information Economy offers The Information Economy
Digest, summarising international trends and issues and NOIE Update,
an email based newsletter containing information
about the various current projects of NOIE, such as small business, e-commerce and smart card technology issues. Subscriptions to
both can be activated via the NOIE website http://www.noie.gov.au
A
fact sheet detailing changes made to the Copyright Act 1968 and their impact
on Australian libraries,
archives, museums and galleries is now available on the website of the
Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. It covers
such topics as: supplying material in response to user requests, copying for
research and preservation, placing material on an intranet or website, making
electronic works available to the public, dealing with Rights Management
Information, public computer terminals, copyright protection measures, and
linking. http://www.dcita.gov.au/nsapi-graphics/?MIval=dca_dispdoc&pathid=5620.
Other
fact sheets include Frequently Asked Questions about the Digital Agenda
Copyright Reforms; Digital Copyright for Creators; Digital Copyright for Web
Publishers. [Source: DCITA]
The
Australian Society of Archivists e-list, aus-archivists, was in full swing
last month, demonstrating the
value of groupware in facilitating meaningful conversation, challenging
professional thinking, clarifying misconceptions and influencing association
policy. The debate was sparked by the National Archives of Australia’s sale
of buildings and record culling program..
According
to Adrian Cunningham, Director of Recordkeeping and Policy at the National
Library, in his article Commonwealth Records and Social Memory: If we
Can’t Remember Everything, Can We Choose What to Forget? (Australian
Historical Association Bulletin December 2000), the National Archives of
Australia in recent years has pursued a policy of retaining about 5% of
Commonwealth records as national archives. This compares with the
international benchmark of about 2%.
Issues
raised in the thread included the impact of technology, increased quantity of
information and increased number of archive enquiries, the economic drivers of
archival strategy,
the quality of archival practice in the past in evaluating information for
retention (some decisions were placed in the too-hard basket), public
perceptions about the culling exercise and the role of the association in
shaping policy.
The
debate is not a new one. The American historian, Charles Francis Adams (1835-1915), wrote: "The question
of the future, so far as the material of history is concerned, relates to the
getting at what has been accumulated - the ready extraction of the marrow. In
other words, it is a problem of differentiation, selection, arrangement,
indexing and cataloguing. Today we are men wandering in a vast wilderness,
which is springing up in every direction with tropical luxuriance. The one
great necessity is to have paths carried through it in some kind of
intelligible plan, which will enable use to find our way wither we would go,
or to tell us in what direction research would be futile".
In
1965, T.R. Schellenberg in The Management of Archives (1965) wrote:
"The volume of printed material is so great that it is questionable whether
scholars and governments should be justified in preserving and by a small
proportion of the unpublished book".
The
sentiment was echoed by F. Gerald Ham in Archival Choices: Managing the Record in the Age of Abundance:
"The age of overabundant records and information, combined with scarcity of
resources, is forcing archivists to replace the essentially unplanned with a
systematic, documented process of building, maintaining and preserving
collections".
And
David Bearman assumed the mantle of agent provocateur in Archival Methods,
1989 when he wrote along the lines that the sooner we admit to the futility of efforts to accumulate a
comprehensive and unbiased records for some future generation, the easier it
will be to argue our benefit to the present and compete for resources with
other essential services. We need to better understand the nature of the
cultural document itself and connections to social action. We need to explore
the internal structure and its use. We need to design systems for its
retrieval which provide access to a variety of perspectives and allow users to
move between views in the conduct of research. The challenge is to make sense
of the documentation, not to keep it. To deliver where it is needed, not to
store it. Let us stress making comprehensible connections of acquiring
comprehensive collections or we risk amassing a rotting storehouse of
knowledge. If current methods to not achieve our goals, how can they be
changed to make them achievable. Instead of envisioning ourselves as victims
of the information explosion, we need to emphasise a vision…. to bring about
an information implosion.
Bearman’s
suggestions on life cycle management, risk management and the transfer of
responsibilities from the grave diggers to the mid-wives, of removing steps in
the pass-the-parcel game, have influenced Australian government
legislation and record keeping programs.
The
most interesting point emerging from the ASA discussion was a call by members of
its Queensland Branch on 4 April 2001 for an Australian Documentation Strategy encompassing all the distributed
archival mandates, whether commonwealth, state or private. “It was felt that
the documentary heritage of Australia was lessened and even that the archival
mandate was weakened through the distributed nature of archival record-keeping
in Australia...an umbrella strategy needs to be developed to
encompass all forms of memory. In this way, the archival mandate would be
enhanced across all jurisdictions,
greatly contributing to the collective memory of the nation”.
The
same point was made several years ago by Adrian Cunningham in From Here to
Eternity: Collecting Archives & the Need for a National Documentation
Strategy (LASIE March 1998).
It
is an issue for library associations and their sub-groups as well as the
Australian Society of Archivists and Records Management Association of
Australia – particularly groups in the corporate library and special library
sector.
Coincidently
the Aus-Archivists discussion occurred in a month when the Cultural Heritage
Council, through the Department of Communications, Information Technology and
the Arts, published Significance: A guide to assessing the Significance of
Cultural Heritge Objects and Collections for the museum sector. The guide
includes selection criteria, case studies and implementation options.
Aus-archivists
was also the forum for extended debate on professional qualifications and
competencies – arising from the
ASA's submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Capacity of Public
Universities to Meet Australia's Higher Education Needs [available at http://www.archivists.org.au/council/subs/uni.html]
and in the context of declining graduate numbers emerging from the university
system:
Susan
Mouer, in The Australian Library Industry Competency Standards: present
perspectives and future prospects (Australian Library Journal May 1997),
gives a useful background on how competency standards grew out of
government-led plans to restructure the Australian economy, promote economic
development through increased productivity and create a nationally consistent
approach to vocational training and education by providing greater
flexibility, clearer career path options and improved mobility between jobs
locally and nationally. The competency standards developed for the library
industry were essentially intended to complement qualifications from
educational institutions by providing benchmarks that indicate performance
requirements or outcomes in accord with broader industry standards. Problems
experienced during the first engagement with the concept included the
difficulty of assessing knowledge versus competence, problems relating to the
industrial context of award restructuring and enterprise bargaining and
decreases in permanent employment.
The
prospect of cross sectoral competencies increased in February when the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Australian
Society of Archivists (ASA) and Records Management Association (RMAA) met to
consider joint issues and actions on professional education, core knowledge across the three information sectors;
integration of course recognition activities, mapping equivalences in Australian
Qualifications Framework, and action on undergraduate and graduate courses,
lobbying, training and CDP and mentoring programs.
Dublin
Core
The
UK Government has adopted the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set www.dublincore.org/
for the description of information resources. The UK Government Metadata
Framework is available online from the Metadata tab at http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/egif/home.html
[Source: aus-archivists]
Networked
Reference Services
The
National Information Standards Organization sponsored an invitational workshop
on Networked Reference Services on April 25-26, 2001. Approximately 25 people attended, representing the broad
spectrum of practitioners, researchers and software developers. The goal of
the workshop was to recommend to NISO the most appropriate next steps for
possible standards development in providing comprehensive and seamless service
for the user, libraries and service providers. It identified aspects of digital reference that could benefit from
standardization, prospective stakeholders, existing work that could be used as
a starting point and the time frame for development of the standard or set of
standards. More information including background documents and presentations: http://www.niso.org/netref.html.
[Source:
DIGLIB]
XML
According
to Information Week 14 May 2001 (XML Coming to a Business Near You and XML
to Infuse the Workplace) the percentage of e-commerce transactions using
XML will rise from 0.5% in early 2000 to more than 40% by the year 2003. Sales
and XML products and services will rise from $90 million in 2000 to US$2.4
billion in 2004. Each vertical industry has a major XML effort under way to
define the data term definitions and schemas for industry-wide exchange of
data. Hurdles to overcome include security, standards development, schema
development, maturity of XML tools and lack of understanding of XML by top
management.
The
latest Current Cites recommends the following sites for SGML/XML
references: http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/biblio.html
and http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/sgml-xml.html.
Another source listed in Current Cites is Jane Hunter’s article MetaNet: A
Metadata Term Thesaurus to Enable Semantic Interoperability Between Metadata
Domains in Journal of Digital Information 1(8) February 2001 (http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v01/i08/Hunter/).
Cites
abstract: “Mapping terminology and cross-walks are all the rage when it
comes to gathering and homogenizing sets of XML data. The problems of mapping
(exact matches and semantic mappings) are articulated, and the use of a
thesaurus -- MetaNet -- is posited as an alternative solution. Instead of
"hardwiring" ontologies between data, terms looked up in a thesaurus
with the usual characteristics in order to build mappings and crosswalks. This
is interesting because what is old is new again; take note of how a age-old
library tool is being used in a new environment”.
Internet
World Australia 2001
The
Internet World Australia 2001 Conference will be held at Sydney Convention and
Exhibition Centre, 18-20 July 2001. Topics: e-business, Internet technology,
Web marketing and advertising, eCRM, Design Online, Wireless Streaming Media,
Small business strategies. Website: www.internetworldasia.com
Web
Design 2001
A
series of five conferences, presented by FirmwareDesign in Sydney and
Melbourne, will continue throughout 2001. Conference 1, held in April, covered web
application development. The remaining conferences are: Conference 2 Web
Integration [June]; Conference 3 Content Management [July/August]; Conference
4 Developing for Business [October]; Conference 5 Broadband to Wireless
[December]. Registration and website: http://wd2001.formware.com.au/bro
Open
2001 Publish, the first annual conference for standards and process in
publishing, will be held at the Sydney Hilton Hotel 30 July-2 August 2001.
Topics: PDF, workflow, mark-up languages, on-demand printing, colour
management, graphic design and other issues on publishing digital, electronic
and traditional forms of information. Website: http://www.openpublish.com.au
For
information on Convergence, the 2001 Joint National Conference of the
Australian Society of Archivists and Records Management Association, see the
ASA website at http://www.archivists.org.au/events/conf2001/
[Source: Aus-Archivists]
Return
to first page
This
issue of Cross Currents compiled by Paul Bentley
The
Wolanski Foundation would be grateful for feedback
on the scope, format and content of this bulletin..
