Virtual records and virtual archives

Will records management continue to be a profession in the twenty-first century or will advances in technology completely eliminate the need for "records" management as we know it today? The answer to such a question will depend on the ability of records managers to understand the effect of automation on the records they assume will be around to manage. In addition to the obvious challenge of technology inducing a "paperless" office environment, there is a much larger danger lurking in today's rampant re-engineering of workplace business processes. The very definition of the traditional term "record" is becoming meaningless in many automated systems. It may be impossible to even define the essence of a "record" and determine how to capture, categorize, store, and manage one. An electronically generated record may be an "information view" that simply lies in the eye of the beholder--a "virtual record" in an information virtual reality.

This major professional dilemma will become increasingly difficult to address as business systems are completely automated and "records," as we know them, are seen as "data" diffused across a business enterprise. Such diffused and distributed data and information defies the ability of any one set of professionals (including data processing professionals) to classify, quantify, and track the information assets of any organization. The growing use of personal computers, electronic mail, and other automated information systems is causing many business records and considerable amounts of other information to be created and stored without generating paper records. However, the definition of what constitutes a record is critical to the records management profession. After all, if one cannot define a record, how can one possibly say what is being managed?

Defining the concept of a "record" within an automated system is of particular importance in light of recent drastic changes in the management style of many organizations. Democratization of the workplace, increasing technology assets, and an information service-based economy are causing a major reorientation for all businesses and their employees toward job functions. New perspectives about the value of some job functions and business processes may redefine the very essence of the professional responsibilities of any records manager. The blend of job skills required, the specific duties performed, the information content managed, and the records manager's role in the workflow of corporate information are all characterized and determined by their organizational function. Increasingly, one sees management cultivating employee innovation and acceptance of change as these employee traits are required for any process of continuing improvement to lead to competitive business advantage. For records managers to continue to contribute to an organization's goals, they must be flexible and learn new concepts. The rapid pace of changing technology dictates that to compete..."In the knowledge society, managers must be prepared to abandon everything they know."(1)

If the concept of a record must change, then new terminology will arise to describe the new information "buckets." Records managers say they are in charge of managing records, including electronic records. However, there are few records managers that understand the use or significance of a "compound document," an information "entity," a data "view," or a "virtual archive." Such terminology may be foreign to the professional language of most records managers, but gaining firm understanding of these concepts is vital to their professional future. As the creation, transmission, and storage of information becomes completely automated, new terminology and concepts will follow advances in information technology.

We now see discussions of "virtual workplaces,"(2) "virtual agencies,"(3) and "virtual archives."(4) Documents can be produced on portable computers from constantly changing locations. Government services can be coordinated and delivered through points of contact not physically located in the same building. Records can be managed by providing information standards for guidance and "master locators" for access to needed records. The physical control and possession of records by centralized records centers may soon be cost prohibitive when compared to the economies inherent in automated systems. It is vital for records managers to understand how their customers now look at the records they create.

VIRTUAL INFORMATION ACCESS

The concept of managing information as a corporate resource has also fostered the idea that information should be shared and be freely accessible for meeting organizational needs. As information architectures are modeled to define the best use and location of information components, it becomes apparent that being in physical possession of information does not by itself mean that one adds value to business processes. It also becomes apparent that one can have access to almost any information needed if it is justifiably related to the performance of job requirements. For these reasons, many individuals are less interested in having physical possession of information than they are in assuring they can retrieve the needed information components for the performance of their tasks. Most individuals and organizations are content to have the generators of information continue to store and maintain it as long as they can have access to the information when it is needed.

This is in stark contrast to the present assumptions of some records center operators. The core of the records management program rests on the eventual physical transmission of a record to the records center before records management accepts actual responsibility for the record. Imagine their surprise when management determines that it is far too costly to ship physical documents to the records center when they can be stored in their original electronic format far more cheaply in the office that originated the record. This may occur as the records center manager complains that accepting electronic versions of documents is somehow not feasible. Suddenly, no more pieces of paper arrive, and there is eventually little need for the records center that contains old paper-based information.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NAR) is now facing a similar challenge. The overwhelming task of accepting physical documents and electronic media of historical interest is straining their ability to deliver access to the very information they seek to preserve. Recent debates about the acceptability of optical disk vs. tape media have given way to an acceptance that no amount of physical receipt of records will be sufficient to match the explosive generation of records by the federal government. NARA is discussing "a technology-enabled "virtual archive." In the virtual-archive scenario, agencies would maintain 'programmatic,' agency-specific records, while Archives would concentrate on documents of broader historical significance." Instead of concentrating on physical possession, the agency would enhance and develop standards and guidance for managing the life cycle of records. NARA is also investigating the "concept of a master locator that would help track records across many agencies."(5) The idea is to change programmatic emphasis from physical custodial possession to a concentration on providing access to information that is virtually everywhere.

VIRTUAL OFFICES

Many professionals travel extensively in the normal course of business. They carry laptop computers to generate documents, send faxes, and check their office electronic mail back on the "home" computer systems. Presentation overheads may be generated with graphics software on the laptop which is then used to show the "slides" at a meeting without ever creating a hard copy of the presentation. After checking the electronic mail box on the computer at the home office, a response may be sent to someone located in another city. A copy of the message will probably be stored on the host computer and may also exist as an electronic document on the laptop. A fax may be received from a customer's computer into the laptop's fax modem located in a hotel room. It may then be stored in the laptop's hard disk after being read on the computer's screen. Printing any of this information to hard copy only increases the cost of doing business.

The "virtual workplace" can be a hotel room or your own den at home by the fireplace. Telecommuting (employees working from home by computer links to the office) is now an accepted work style by some companies seeking to reduce transportation difficulties for employees and local communities. One of the best ways to reduce the expense of office space is to have the employee go home. However, decentralizing the office and saving such expenses is not without adverse affects on some employees. "As companies decentralize and reform themselves around their information networks--tying branch offices, telecommuting employees and customers together with private networks, satellites, laptop computers, and fax machines--the result is sometimes the end of entire middle layers of management."(6) Tracking records in this environment will need to be done with the enforcement of standards, guidelines, and with some records management responsibilities being distributed to end users.

The trend toward distributed workplaces can offer benefits to families that do not want to relocate and companies that do not want to pay the costs of transfers. When customers are distributed nationally or internationally and most communication is electronic, is there really a need to rent expensive downtown office space in a large city? One of the major cost savings in outsourcing some business functions is the savings in overheads and office spaces. Why not simply let the employees work out of their homes and keep their skills and job knowledge? Of course, such organizational changes will not be without some additional considerations, especially for government agencies. In such cases, "...building virtual departments means agencies must adhere to new management schemes as well as revamp their data storage procedures...."(7)

VIRTUAL DOCUMENTS

It is presently very difficult to describe a "record" in many automation systems as anything other than "an information view at a particular time." Several contemporary technologies that are intended to reduce paper generation actually create the concept of a "virtual document" by the way they organize information. There is an extreme need for new concepts and terminology that will allow defining a record within these systems.

Automation systems that generate electronic forms are initially the easiest to discuss. When computer software generates a "form" the actual data that appears in the fields in the printed form may be stored in a separate computer file from the image of the form. This allows storing the appearance of the form (blanks, lines, or text) only once which saves disk space and allows reuse of the form. For example, a travel form may have the traveler's name and dates of travel in one computer file and the appearance of the empty form stored in another file. To print a record copy of the form would require "merging" the traveler data into the form data and printing it together on a piece of paper. The merging of data types may really occur in the computer memory of the printer. So, where is the complete "electronic copy?" It occurs in the memory of the printer for a few seconds!

The use of imaging systems and the currently popular "workflow" approach to designing electronic "document management systems" will keep records managers very busy assuring they still receive record copies. These systems are intended to mimic the normal business processes used to move information throughout a department or business, often by networking workstations that perform specific tasks at specific times. Some systems capture text and graphics as bit-mapped images with document scanners to be filed on a computer's disk drive. They may use optical character recognition to convert some of the text on the scanned documents into text which can be edited by the computer system. Other systems are designed as organization-wide desktop publishing systems which enable creating, editing, transmitting, and storing documents without creating paper copies. The assumption is that the contents of a computer file can be used as a record copy of a document and no paper may need to be generated. Many of the vendors of these systems do not communicate that only with their software and hardware can the "document" be regenerated.

A common problem with all computer databases is that there are multiple ways to view the information at any one time. This is the primary advantage of using relational database management systems to store information. However, such flexibility in data management can pose serious challenges for audit purposes unless audit trails are programmed into the systems. "The operational environment provides no historical perspective for use in decision-making," because most transactional database systems rarely keep information more than a few months. One solution to this problem is a "data warehouse" which is used to store time-stamped snapshots of the database data that have been filtered into meaningful information for later analysis.(8) This provides, to a degree, a record copy of the data within a database without generating paper.

Another method of preserving views of data in computer systems is to create virtual documents with Computer Output Laser Disk (COLD) technology. This is an interesting technology that capitalizes on the need for snapshots of information at specific times for records purposes. Instead of using computer-output-microfilm (COM) for "printing" transaction or report documents, the results of database queries are written as ASCII files to optical disk storage systems. This saves the time required for processing COM and requirements for special COM readers. It also retains the data in a computer readable format.(9) Once again, no paper is generated, and the content, format, and substance of these virtual records may be determined by data processing personnel or the user of the system.

VIRTUAL RECORD COPIES

There are a number of factors that must be considered in determining if a record is to be considered a "record copy." Organizational ownership, creator responsibility, originating source, and official designation can all be considered aspects of declaring a document to be a record or a record copy. For the general concept of a record to apply to all records and media types, the descriptive terminology must be relevant and functional in all information architectures. It must encompass multimedia documents, database views, electronic forms, electronic mail, and temporal snapshots of information as well as simple hard copy documents. There is no present terminology that works well across all of these information processing environments.

A record copy, official copy, or "copy of record" can be declared to be the record that is sent to the records center due to a status of official ownership in an official location. A record copy may also be the originally created document still in the author's hands if no other copies are available. Should there ever be a contest of authenticity between a record copy and an original document, the authenticity of the original document will probably prevail. An unofficial copy may become a record copy if the record copy is destroyed. Hopefully the record copy will never become destroyed because it is the "master" copy which is not circulated. All of this serves to illustrate the difficult nature of the concepts of record and record copy. It will be very difficult to apply these concepts within automated systems as ownership, location, and status of the records may not be clear.

As documents or records are created electronically, there is a danger that they may never progress through any records life cycle management to an official status for storage somewhere in a quantifiable and locatable manner. A virtual document may be generated within an automation system, enjoy a useful life, and retire or be destroyed without ever being considered a record of interest to records management. The information distributed throughout automated systems exists in a sense in a virtual archive of "information products" or "information views" that will be stored until they become obsolete to the purposes of the system that houses them.

There is no simple answer or solution to many of the questions posed by the challenges discussed. No specific word explains this new concept of "virtual information" which seems to be data viewed from a singular perspective. Discrepancies in the ability of present terminology to explain new concepts "remind us why new realities often demand new words."(10) The profession of records management will need to support the development of new distributed information management concepts to remain professionally viable over the next few years.

FOOTNOTES

1. Peter F. Drucker, "The New Society of Organizations," Harvard Business Review, 70(5), p. 95, September-October 1992.

2. David C. Churbuck and Jeffrey S. Young, "The Virtual Workplace," Forbes, 150(12), p. 184-190, November 23, 1992.

3. Kevin Power, "Task force lays a foundation for 'virtual agencies' of govt.," Government Computer News, 12(14), p. 1, 76, July 5, 1993.

4. John Moore, "Wilson's Departure May Lead to New Policies--NARA may seek to adopt virtual archives for agency records," Federal Computer Week, 7(5), p. 6, 8, March 1, 1993.

5. Moore, p. 6.

6. Churbuck and Young, p. 186.

7. Power, p. 76.

8. James W. Ashbrook, "Information Preservation," CIO, 6(15), p. 24-26, July, 1993.

9. Franklin I. Bolnick, "Computer Output Laser Disk (COLD) Systems-COM Replacement Units," Document Image Automation, 13(1), p. 22-23, Spring 1993.

10. Drucker, p. 100.

Copyright Association of Records Managers Administrators Inc. Jan 1994
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