Archive, Records and Information Management

Within HATII there is a strong interest in archive, records and information management (RIM) research. HATII was the lead partner in the influential European Electronic Resource Preservation and Access Network (ERPANET) project. The ERPANET project engaged 213 leading researcher-practitioners from 143 institutions in the public and private sectors in forty-three different countries, and produced nearly fifty publications, including preservation guidelines, a series of path-breaking reports, one hundred case studies, and three collections of essays including Managing and Archiving Records in the Digital Era: Changing Professional Orientations, Niklaus Bütikofer, Hans Hofman and Seamus Ross (eds.) (Hier+jetzt, 2006).

DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) was funded under the EU’s FP6 programme to continue the work ERPANET had begun. We have adopted a risk-based approach to research and learning in this area that distances us from the existing literature, and crucially places RIM at a strategic level within organizations.

Our shared approach to how RIM is situated in an increasingly compliance-driven environment found expression in the collection of essays by researchers in HATII and co-edited by Michael Moss & Alistair Tough, Record-keeping in a Hybrid Environment (Chandos, 2006). These are issues that feature prominently on EU, UK and US government agendas, and Tough has extended such concerns to sub-Saharan African. This has led to his participation in witness seminars to shape future directions in records management in the region, participation in an initiative to evaluate record-keeping improvement projects there from a user perspective, and research visits to HATII by Commonwealth Fellows from Malawi and Kenya.

All these activities contribute directly to knowledge transfer from the academy to the private and public sector, and from RIM to the inter-government commitment to encourage transparency and accountability, particularly in developing countries. Azman Mat- Isa, now a lecturer at the Universiti Teknologi in Malaya, completed his doctoral thesis in this area.