This is a two year initiative based within the University of Glasgow Archives and Business Records Centre and funded by the JISC Technology Applications Programme (JTAP).

The overall aim of the project is to provide tools and protocols for the effective management of information in the digital order, with particular attention to information held in a document-based form. It builds on the principles outlined in the University's Information Strategy.

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The problem

The technological developments which have resulted in a massive quantitative increase in information, and particularly in document-based information, have not necessarily rendered that information fully usable.

Some people may be unaware of the existence of the information; others are aware of its existence but are frustrated in their attempts to access it efficiently; others feel overwhelmed by the very quantity of the information with which they are confronted.

Some of the problems may be familiar, particularly to regular users of the Web:

• How can I locate information, and ensure that my own information is locatable by others?
• What are the important criteria by which I need to locate information?
• Having located a resource, whether that is a document or a collection of documents, how can I navigate effectively and efficiently within it?
• How can I systematically identify and reference components of information?
• How can I ensure the confidentiality of restricted information?
• How can I ensure the free availability of unrestricted information?
• How can I ensure that a document is genuine?

These are only a few of the more frequently encountered difficulties in exploiting document-based information.

For information to have value as knowledge, it must be managed effectively.

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The major issues

In attempting to address these problems, the project is presently exploring several inter-related areas of information management:

• Searching and the role of metadata and authority files
• Navigability and the importance of information structure
• Authorisation and access control
• Identifying and referencing components of information
• Retention and archiving

The pages listed above will be developed as the project proceeds. They will include links to relevant resources such as:

• discussion papers generated by the project and by other parties internal and external to the university;
• published articles on these and related topics;
• the sites of other organisations working in these fields;
• standard reference sources for the technologies which the project is applying;
• useful software tools.

We hope, however, that these pages will be much more than a list of links. Certainly, we would like to be able to inform authors and users of electronic documents of the practical progress of the project in these areas. Perhaps more importantly, in line with the "awareness-raising" function of the project, we hope that they will be a resource to communicate, and to stimulate discussion on, some of the ideas which we perceive as fundamental to an effective electronic records management system.

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The approach

The project's approach to these issues draws on both the principles of records management which have been applied successfully to paper documents, and on the technology available to offer the access and functionality required by document authors and users.

Throughout the course of the project documents, reports and presentations will be made available which expand on these principles, outline a development plan for the project and describe its progress. A series of workshops on the key information issues is also planned.

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The task

As a first step, the project is looking at the management of the documents generated and used by a subset of the committees of the University.

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