Report prepared by Kate Cumming
Lat month, four fantastic thinkers came together at a Recordkeeping Roundtable event to discuss recordkeeping in the contemporary workplace.
The event was inspired by James Lappin’s paper, Rival records management models in an era of partial automation, and James was the event’s first speaker.
James Lappin
started by saying that we are at the tail end of the era of partial automation. James identified this era as beginning in 1996. Not coincidentally, this was also the year that the world’s first national standard on records management was published.
James pointed out that this standard required organisations to consistently and routinely capture records into managed, shared environments, and to organise them by business process. However, in 2021, we now realise this isn’t possible, particularly with key communicative records stored in email and other collaboration systems. Corporate practice is almost universally showing that primarily, these records are automatically filed into organisation’s main email messaging system or within another collaborative platform like Teams and this is where they remain. In a far cry from the aim of records management standards, in these environments they are not organised by business process, but are instead siloed in personal accounts in a simple, chronological filing structure. There they are not managed by corporate rules, not accessible as a knowledge resource and not accessible into the future, once an individual leaves an organisation.
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Longtime friend of the Recordkeeping Roundtable Adrian Cunningham worked for 36 years in collecting archives, government archives and in university settings and research projects. During that time his work traversed almost all functional areas of archival endeavour, with his latter-day focus being on digital recordkeeping and digital archiving. He has published widely and now operates as an independent consultant and is a member of ISO TC46/SC11 Committee on Records Management and Archives and as a member of the International Council on Archives Experts Group on Archival Description.
In part 2 of our chat with Ellen Broad, we talks about privacy and changing attitudes to data about – and of – ourselves. Ellen’s book, Made by Humans: The AI Condition is 
In this latest episode of Recordkeeping Roundcasts, we talk to Ellen Broad, author of Made by Humans: The AI Condition, about the way that rapidly advancing technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are being deployed in business, government and society, and the wide ranging implications of their adoption. Ellen and the Roundtable’s Cassie Findlay discuss on real world results flowing from machine decision making, accountability for the use of these systems, the role of recordkeeping and archives, and changing perceptions of privacy in the data economy.
In this first episode the Recordkeeping Roundtable’s Cassie Findlay is talking with John Sheridan, Digital Director at The National Archives UK, about the challenges of scale and complexity that come with digital recordkeeping. As background for this conversation, take a look at 
