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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