摘要：Records managers have never questioned their need to be involved in the management of electronic records. If it was difficult to convince information technology (IT) of this, it was due to indifference rather than hostility. The first concern of IT has always been operational: ensuring system performance and availability and providing for recovery in the event of disaster. As long as the system was up and running, IT took a sledge hammer approach to records retention issues – back everything up and keep it on tape as long as needed. This allowed the proverbial killing of two birds with one stone: disaster recovery and record retention. For a time it was difficult to justify retention management of electronic records based purely on operational concerns because storage was cheaper than the labor it would have taken to design and implement retention and disposition strategies. Understandably, IT had to focus on its directive of managing systems operations.
