The science of recordkeeping systems - a realist perspective

The mass adoption of email systems in the 1990s brought with it a revolution in communications. For the first time in human history the majority of written communications were sent by digital rather than analogue means. This communications revolution had a huge impact on recordkeeping theory and practice. It stimulated a mini-renaissance of records management theory but was also disruptive and contentious. Rival paradigms emerged within the recordkeeping profession. One paradigm argued that email systems were purely communication tools, email accounts were little more than electronic pigeon holes, and that an email became a record only if (and when) a decision was made to capture it into a dedicated records repository. A rival paradigm argued that email systems formed part of an organisation’s record system, that email accounts would function as record aggregations (whether organisations wanted them to or not) and that emails were records from the moment they were sent from, or received into, an email system. The points of contention between these rival paradigms touch upon some fundamental questions of archival science, such as what it means to create and capture a record, and how records should be organised. These points of contention cannot be resolved by existing recordkeeping theory. In the 1990s Frank Upward developed a records continuum model that conceptualised how recordkeeping processes worked across an entire society. This is an enormously useful middle-range theory whose breadth and flexibility has enabled it to outlive most of the other theoretical outputs of the 1990s in the recordkeeping domain. But Upward’s model does not provide a close enough view of an organisational record system to enable the consequences of different policy choices to be assessed and compared. This study starts with a selective critical review of the history of ideas on how recordkeeping systems work. It attempts to place the ideas of the major theorists of recordkeeping systems (Jenkinson, Schellenberg, Scott, Bearman, ...