Records Management and Information Culture, written by Gillian Oliver and Fiorella Foscarini is a new work from Facet Publishing. Oliver is a lecturer at the School of Information Management of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is also co-editor-in-chief for the journal Archival Science. Foscarini is a lecturer at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada. They share the research interest in records management and information culture.
The authors’ aim is twofold: to identify “the messy and difficult issues which are inevitable when we attempt to manage records in organizations”, and to address those issues. Their practical experience with archives and records management as well as their theoretical knowledge enables them to present theoretical basics and write a handbook for developing record management procedures and practices in organizations.
The first part and Chapter 1 “establishes the overall context, with literature review of information culture […] and explains the relevance of information culture” to the current practitioners. Every organization has an information culture, which depends on many factors. Factors important for records management, such as attitude of employees to information sharing, integrity, control, are presented. They explain their own research outcomes and connect experience with theory published by different researchers. They introduce the Information Culture Framework (ICF), which is the centre of the book. This is presented as a triangle with three levels. Level 1, the bottom level, consists of the value accorded to records by employees, employees’ information preferences, employees’ language considerations and regional technological infrastructure. Level 2, the middle level, holds information-related competencies and employees’ awareness of environmental requirements. Level 3, the top level, talks about information technology governance and trust. These concepts are the “messy and difficult issues” and are addressed in separate chapters in the following three parts of the book. The final part with one chapter serves as a synthesis.
The structure of the book and each chapter is very clear and systematic. The introductory paragraph explains the content of the chapter. Each chapter ends with a summary, a section of next steps, notes and references. Numerous clear and non-intrusive cross-references avoid overburdening the reader and the text with explanations.
A particularly valuable point is the authors’ efforts to prepare this as an internationally useful handbook. Although the different information cultures in different countries may prevent the book from being entirely practical, the abundant references and clear explanations can still be informative and useful in any country with any information culture.
Oliver and Foscarini acknowledge that ICF is only one of the methods for studying and assessing records management processes and procedures in an organization. They also present Designing and Implementing Recordkeeping System and Impact Calculator and Records Management Maturity Model, discussing advantages and disadvantages of both compared to ICF. They believe that only ICF takes into account the “messy people dimension” and this method has therefore the potential to be more effective. It seems that the authors try to introduce the user perspective as opposed to the systems perspective in information science.
This is a clearly written and systematic presentation of a method for assessing and developing records management procedures. I find it interesting for records management and archives specialists but also inspiring for difficult issues in subject determination for library catalogues. I fear, however, that it is not very useful for some countries where records management is at the very margin of administrative attention. Although the authors stress that the book is intended for just those countries, they may have succeeded more for Australia than for Central and East Europe, for instance.
