With characteristic insight, Peter Mazikana observes (in Chapter 7) that for records and information improvement initiatives to be genuinely successful, transformational leadership is required. If an exemplar of such leadership is required, then we need to look no further than Anne Thurston in whose honour this collection of essays has been published. Anne combines charisma, scholarship, incisive analysis and a capacity for getting things done in challenging environments. The power of this combination is reflected in the number of contributors to this volume and in the range of topics that they cover.
For the benefit of readers who do not know Anne, one example may serve to illustrate the extraordinary person being celebrated here. At the turn of the present century, Anne arrived in Dar-es-Salaam with the intention of making a film that would extol the benefits of good e-RM. She had set aside one week for the purpose. In a country like Tanzania where business is normally carried out at a leisurely pace, this was an ambitious undertaking. On a Monday morning, she called on Blue Mango Productions and discussed the project with their team. They agreed to drop all other commitments and devote the week to her work. Something resembling a whirlwind then developed. Key personnel from the Tanzania Records Management Project were sucked into the film production work. At extraordinary speed arrangements were made to interview high-ranking civil servants. Locations for filming were identified and permission was granted, again at a high speed. By the time Anne left on Friday, only post-production work remained to be done. The writer of this review then drove from Dar-es-Salaam airport to the premises of Blue Mango Productions, where their team was slumped in arm chairs in a state of near exhaustion. He was greeted with the words “Can you explain to us why we have spent the last week working twice as hard as normal after we agreed to do the work for half our usual rate?” Such is Anne’s characteristic impact.
In the opening Chapter, Nathan Mnjama provides an informative overview of the development of Anne Thurston’s work in and for Africa. He explains how she began an archival career in Kenya and was then sent to London to obtain information about records held there relating to Kenya. From archives, her attention began to broaden out to encompass records management. The need to provide post-graduate training that addressed the needs of records professionals from Africa also engaged her interest. As virtually all postgraduate students from the developing countries of the Commonwealth made their way to University College London, it was for their benefit that Anne promoted a root and branch revision of the taught postgraduate course at UCL. This, in turn, was followed by a ground-breaking development of doctoral studies. Mnjama outlines, with admirable clarity, how a series of initiatives and workshops brought these interests into a highly productive alignment. As he points out, Anne was remarkably successful in obtaining funding, ultimately persuading the Commonwealth Foundation and the UK’s Overseas Development Agency (now DFID) to make significant contributions.
Oddly, the outputs of the Tanzania Records Management Project (TRMP) – a three years project with a budget of £1.8 million – are described in Mnjama’s Chapter as if they were the result of a brief workshop. In providing an abbreviated account of events, he omits some of the most significant achievements of the TRMP. The TRMP’s pioneering work on vocational training was absolutely ground breaking as far as the Tanzanian public service was concerned, not least because workplace assessment replaced examinations for the first time. Similarly, the work on Records Management Improvement Methodology (RMIM) marked a significant break with established practice. Instead of measuring only internal processes, the TRMP moved into the much more challenging and complex business of aligning RMIM with organisational objectives. New legislation enabling the Director of Records and Archives Management to oversee e-RM from the Office of the President was another key achievement. Perhaps, the greatest testimony to the success of the TRMP was the fact that years after donor funding came to an end, work commenced during the project, which was still being carried forward by Tanzanian personnel on their own initiative.
Other country projects do receive interesting and informative coverage in this volume. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the work undertaken in Sierra Leone. Chapter 9 outlines the considerable obstacles that poor record keeping poses to effective audit and accounting in Ghana. The discussions of problems arising in relation to the public payroll which can be found in Chapters 4 and 9 are particularly interesting. The most immediately evident problem is the presence of “ghost workers” – fictitious public servants whose salaries are drawn by senior officers. A more complex and unjust variation of this occurs where genuine civil servants reach retirement age but do not receive their pensions because senior colleagues keep them on the payroll as active members of staff and siphon-off their earnings. An additional challenge arises in relation to advances of salary – loans given to public servants from the public purse. In some countries, chronic failure to repay these loans constitutes a major drain on public finances.
Chapter 10 by David Luyomba is based on survey evidence gathered from both civil servants working in the Department of Lands in Uganda and those who use the land records. The emphasis on user perspectives is welcome and provides strong empirical evidence that all is not well. The apparent failure of a digitisation project is attributed to power blackouts, lack of confidence in the long-term viability of the project and a tendency to bring into the digital environment poor practices and inconsistent procedures from a failing manual system. Curiously, amongst the benefits of good RM in relation to land records that Luyomba enumerates, inward investment is not included. Yet, security of tenure is usually an absolute requirement before foreign businesses will build factories, hotels or commercial premises. It would be interesting to know whether the Land Registry digitisation project to which Luyomba refers is the USAID project completed in 2001: this involved the installation of systems that complied with the USA DoD standard and, thus, put the Department of Lands out of step with the rest of the civil service in Uganda. Chapter 8 discusses the difficulties encountered by the South African National Archives in ingesting and making available records of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There is one noteworthy difference between this South African project and the Sierra Leonean, Ghanaian and Ugandan projects discussed aforementioned, in that international development funds are not a factor. Otherwise, the challenges enumerated might seem familiar elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa – lack of resources, lack of support from the most senior levels of government and a persistent culture of secrecy.
Chapter 2 by Laura Millar outlines the considerable achievements of the IRMT in producing and disseminating a wide range of training materials through the Management of Public Sector Records (MPSR), and the Training in Electronic Records Management (TERM) programmes. In doing so, she pays tribute both to Anne Thurston and to Michael Roper for their leadership. These training packages have proved of great value for knowledge transfer and particularly for workplace training. Arguably, they have some advantages over higher education awards: the latter provide accreditation on the basis of which members of staff leave hard-pressed national archives and records institutions in search of better remunerated work in the private or nationalised industry sectors. In contrast, skills acquired through the MSPR and TERM materials tend to promote staff retention.
In Chapter 18, Charles Farrugia pays tribute to Anne Thurston in the context of her contributions to ACARM, not least by facilitating secretarial support from the IRMT. Farrugia provides an interesting account of the close working relations that have developed between the ICA and ACARM. This might have benefited from being augmented with some mention of the East and Central African Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ESARBICA), not least because so many of the chapters in this book are based on projects and other forms of experienced gained in East and Central Africa. ESARBICA is a highly effective organisation with well-attended conferences and an influential journal. It is also dominated by Commonwealth countries most of which are ACARM members.
Chapters 5 and 6 by Mandy Banton and Paul Lihoma, respectively, reflect Anne Thurston’s interest in archives. Both are based on exemplary and scholarly utilisation of archives to write about archives. Banton’s topic is the development of record keeping in the Colonial Office (most particularly in relation to the West Indies) and the conceptions of accountability that are reflected in the record-keeping systems. To most colonial civil servants, it would have been clear that their primary accountability was upwards through a hierarchical chain of command to the Colonial (or Chief) Secretary: this pattern will be familiar to most people who have worked in the developing countries of the Commonwealth in recent years and it is reflected in Peter Mazikana’s chapter on organisational culture. Lihoma’s chapter is based primarily on the files of his predecessor John Drew. He makes the points that under the government of Dr Banda, access became more difficult following independence than it had been under the colonial regime, that arbitrary delays and disruptions characterised the experience of readers, and that the National Archives of Malawi as an institution was used for surveillance of suspected political opponents of the government.
Chapter 13 by Justus Wamukoya is the first of four chapters devoted specifically to aspects of electronic Records Management. Wamukoya focuses on the relationship between e-RM and good governance, i.e. the detection and deterrence of corrupt and unethical conduct. His contribution pays particular attention to countries in East Africa. He shows that the absence of record-keeping infrastructure (policies, legislation, standards, etc) is a major barrier to progress and that this is compounded both by a tendency to disregard standards where they are available and by serious capacity-building issues. Another significant factor is the tendency of senior managers to place excessive trust in the capacity of IT systems to deliver “solutions” despite a demonstrable lack of interest in questions of evidential value on the part of IT personnel.
In chapter 14, Olav Hagen Sataslatten reflects on the experience of delivering (or attempting to deliver) good e-RM systems in Yemen and Kenya. His work with the Yemeni courts seems to have produced worthwhile outputs. The workshop in Kenya, in contrast, seems to have been less productive. Sataslatten attributes this, at least in part, to a failure to specify standards and then insist that vendors must adhere to them. This seems a little simplistic. Many public sector bodies in developing countries lack the know-how necessary to manage vendors. In effect, they rely on the vendors to tell them what standards are appropriate. If this were not the case, then the client organisations might reasonably aspire to dispense with the services of vendors and use open access software instead.
In Chapter 15, one of the outstanding contributions to the volume, Anthea Seles performs a double function. Firstly, she explains the background to and the development of Open Archives/Trusted Digital Repositories, providing an admirable synthesis of a mass of complex material. As part of this, she outlines the available standards for the evaluation of Trusted Digital Repositories. Secondly, she provides an account of the situation on the ground in East African countries from which it is apparent that standards developed in well-resourced institutions in wealthy countries (notably NASA, the American space agency) are simply not appropriate in East Africa. As she explains, many African governments have a naive belief that ICTs will produce an economic and public service transformation in an almost magical way. There is a widespread failure to appreciate that once IT systems are in place, their content needs to be managed to create and maintain evidential value. Lacking both skilled personnel and aspects of the physical infrastructure (at the most basic level, a reliable electricity supply) governments have de facto created systems that cannot be regarded as trustworthy and in which illicit tampering and deletion cannot be detected. Seles concludes on a positive note, stressing that the development of new standards for Trusted Digital Repositories, in conjunction with developing countries, has the potential to benefit a range of institutions in the developed world that can ill-afford the gold-plated approaches favoured by NASA and the RLG.
In Chapter 16, Duranti and Rogers consider the challenge of establishing trust in the online environment, where “big data” and data mining may constitute a form of surveillance that threatens privacy (and potentially much more). They make the cardinal point – often overlooked – that control of metadata is a vital consideration, especially in relation to cloud services. In their discussion of trust, they helpfully distinguish different levels of trust: fiduciary, good faith and unconscionability. Unfortunately, they adopt a definition of the term “trustee” that is the diametric opposite of the meaning conventionally used in the United Kingdom – which rather underlines the challenges of working with nations divided by a common language. Their main conclusion is that an international legal framework should provide the best way of establishing the conditions necessary to create demonstrable trustworthiness, as national and other jurisdictions struggle to cope with the regulation of a global phenomenon. They briefly recognise that this will necessarily involve cross-cultural working, but do not provide an examination of what this might entail in relation to developing countries. Given that mobile banking based on the use of smart phones is significantly more advanced in Africa than in the USA, there might be scope for mutually beneficial findings if this analysis were to be carried forward into future research.
Chapter 7 by Peter Mazikana gives a lucid, even masterly, overview of public sector reform initiatives over recent decades and identifies deep-seated cultural factors as the main impediment to achieving progress in records and information improvement programmes. He urges that both parent organisations and their archives and records components need transformational leadership to realise the true potential of ICTs. Whilst this “broad brush” approach has much to commend it, it does not offer any guidance on how to tackle one of the pernicious problems that has be-devilled most records and information improvement programmes (and many other reform initiatives), namely, the tendency of African civil servants to swamp IT systems with personal and recreational content. This is not a minor matter. In many ministries, departments and agencies in Africa, the proportion of server space taken up with home movies, knitting patterns, recipes, recordings of church choirs and other less wholesome material exceeds 80 per cent, and the consequences are serious. Unfortunately, none of the chapters explicitly concerned with e-RM address this issue either.
The concluding chapter by John McDonald performs the traditional role of paying tribute to the person being recognised by the volume of essays and he does this well. He goes beyond that remit and offers original and thought-provoking ideas about how “bridges” might be built between developing and developed countries. In doing so, he emphasises the crucial importance of “matching record-keeping traditions”: this implies that Commonwealth countries seeking to make major improvements in e-RM would be well advised to partner with institutions and individuals in Britain, Canada and the other technically advanced countries that share a common inheritance in their legal systems, educational institutions and much more beside. McDonald looks to a partnership between the ICA and IRMT to carry his proposals into practice. In doing so, he cites discussions over a proposed centre for digital records management in East Africa as a possible focal point. It is explicit in the analysis presented here that national archival institutions in the technically advanced countries should play a leading role. That there is a wider pool of skilled personnel available, not least in Higher Education, is readily apparent from a glance through the Tabula Gratulatoria which concludes the volume.
Overall, this is an informative, interesting and timely book which will certainly be of interest to records professionals in developing countries and to archival educators more widely. The chapters devoted to e-RM alone would justify the purchase of the book by a much wider audience. Inevitably, there are matters with which one might quibble: why is the challenge of creating written records in overwhelmingly oral cultures disregarded? Why is there no appendix listing Anne Thurston’s publications? These, however, are minor matters; the editors and contributors deserve to be congratulated on the production of a collection of genuinely inter-related essays that many readers of the RMJ will find thought-provoking and helpful.
