Presented by Kim Eberhard
A school launches a new educational framework which promises to deliver individual learning programs for each student. A key element of this is to track the growth and development of each child through one-on-one `conversations’ which are recorded digitally, alongside more traditional, albeit electronic, records of attendance, achievement, etc. Parents are also promised that these records will continue to be available to the child even after he/she has left school.
The IT department of the school is given the task of ensuring that these promises can be delivered. It is only when the information specialists at the school begin to ask questions about recordkeeping frameworks, access and security arrangements, migration of formats, guarantees of authenticity, etc, that reality begins to hit home. An off-the-shelf `solution’ is purchased by the IT department and rolled out across the school without consultation with anyone or training for staff. An information black hole has now been created.
There are many lessons to be learned from this experience including the need to maintain a close working relationship between archivists and IT specialists and the need to work proactively to encourage an organisation-wide recordkeeping culture as well as practice. Sharing a common language (eg agreement about what `archiving’ means and implies) is vital. This is a tale about how two facets of one organisation failed to come together to achieve a common goal.