Questions addressed in this chapter

Did the concept of management ‘regardless of format’ ever really make sense?

It has long been an accepted truism of records management that we manage records according to their content and regardless of their format. It would have been nonsense to believe that the access or retention requirements of a record differed, simply because a version happened to be held on microfilm while another version covering the same content existed as a paper record. In this scenario, the format of the record is immaterial and from the management perspective it is the content that counts.

Certainly, when I was training to be a records manager a decade or so ago, the notion of management regardless of format was well and truly in vogue as a central plank of our approach to the management of electronic records. During the mid-1990s users were often likely to see the electronic version of their record as being somehow very different and even divorced entirely from its paper counterpart, which was clearly an unwelcome and unhelpful development. Our own professional perspective also risked being warped by the many and varied technical challenges posed by new electronic media, to the point where consideration of its content seemed almost an afterthought, with the focus very much on file formats, media instability and preservation of the bit stream. It must also be said that a concentration on content made life easier for members of the archive and records management professions. By retaining this sole focus on content, these professions were able to largely ignore the very real technical and scientific challenges posed by the need to manage the physical format of records, whether this be the specific storage requirements for magnetic media, the complexities of dealing with audio-visual content, or the science behind techniques for the mass de-acidification of late 19th century paper – all of which have been largely left to other professions to resolve.