Appraisal: A strategic tool for modern recordkeeping

Preprint of an article published in Lligall 41, the journal of the Association of Catalonian Archivists. In the revised edition of ISO 15489-1:2016 Records management, the concept of ‘appraisal’ takes on a wider scope than is perhaps familiar to some archivists. Rather than being limited to the examination and selection of extant records to make … More Appraisal: A strategic tool for modern recordkeeping

Crunch Time: The revised ISO 15489 and the future of recordkeeping  

In Berlin in May 2012, a new International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Working Group was convened and given the task of reviewing and revising the International Standard ISO 15489 on records management. It had been twelve years since the issue of the first edition. In that time, a few attempts to do this revision had … More Crunch Time: The revised ISO 15489 and the future of recordkeeping  

Participatory cultures, trust technologies and decentralisation: Innovation opportunities for recordkeeping

As published recently by the Australian Society of Archivists, in Archives and Manuscripts. Here’s my pre-print. Abstract Recordkeeping professionals build and manage systems that support the creation and maintenance of trustworthy records, however our approach to the design and implementation of such systems has suffered from a lack of innovation and a failure to collaborate … More Participatory cultures, trust technologies and decentralisation: Innovation opportunities for recordkeeping

Ideas on using appraisal techniques to plan for the use of blockchain technologies in recordkeeping systems

Recordkeeping professionals seek to design systems that will ensure that trustworthy evidence can be relied upon by the communities we serve, and community memory protected over time. However current recordkeeping implementations are flawed, and permit imperfect recordkeeping, inequitable access to records and records loss. Recordkeeping systems implementations have failed to keep pace with trends towards decentralization and personally controlled personal data. The emergence of decentralised trust through computation as seen with blockchain technologies allows us to imagine new models for recordkeeping that can also bring greater assurance of longevity and availability for records users, and offer new opportunities for individuals to keep their own records. In this post, I consider the problem of enabling children in out of home care to make and keep their own records in light of innovations in decentralised trust mechanisms and specifically blockchain technology, and use the core recordkeeping skill of appraisal to better understand how blockchain technologies might form part of the solution.  
More Ideas on using appraisal techniques to plan for the use of blockchain technologies in recordkeeping systems