Basic Textbooks and Manuals. Archivists and records managers alike have had a love affair with basic manuals and textbooks. Part of this stems from records professionals’ long-term interest in both basic information about records work, especially driven by their reliance until recently almost exclusively on workshops and other short-term training programs, and continuing anxiety about credentials. Both archives and records management certification are supported by associations with Web sites. The Academy of Certified Archivists (http://www.certifiedarchivists.org/) “supports and promotes the highest level of professional archival practice,” “takes a leadership role by defining the knowledge and abilities necessary to be an archivist,” and, of course, certifies archivists and promotes their employment. Their Web site includes a full handbook with study materials and a list of other readings, and I am sure some individuals will mistakenly accept this as a surrogate basic textbook. There is also a Web site for the Institute of Certified Records Managers (ICRM) (http://www.icrm.org/intro.html), the “certifying organization of and for professional records and information managers,” incorporated in 1975. While the Web site provides ample information about the examination, there are no reading lists or study materials made available – a surprising omission. A related organization, the Nuclear Information and Records Management Association (NIRMA), is a non-profit, professional association established in 1977, assisting “individuals and their companies in developing and maintaining the technical foundation required to handle the increased pressures that mark our quickly advancing information age.” NIRMA also has a Web site (http://www.nirma.org/newhome/index.html) and while it publishes a study guide, it does not provide this guide online.

Records professionals can look to other sources that can provide basic or introductory materials on aspects of records management work. These are examples, rather than an effort to be comprehensive. The “Archivist's Toolkit,” maintained by the Archives Association of British Columbia (http://aabc.bc.ca/aabc/toolkit.html) is “designed as a community resource for use by those working primarily in small and medium-sized archives in British Columbia, Canada. The toolkit includes information on establishing an archives, appraisal and accessioning, arrangement and description, reference and access, and other online resources. As is often the problem with such references, there is the tendency to provide basic information and advice rather than to indicate the complexities of some of the archival tasks. For example, under appraisal there is a document entitled “Functional Categories of Records Grouped by Relative Importance” taken from Maynard J. Brichford, Archives & Manuscripts: Appraisal & Accessioning (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1977), pp. 22-23. This is a terrible document to provide without commentary because it seems to reduce appraisal to a simple checklist of document type rather than a more complex task of analysis. This may be the result of its audience. The target audience of small and medium sized repositories seems to suggest that these guides are for those with no formal education in archival work. The greater problem is that much of the advice provided is done so without any critical commentary about the relative strengths or possible limitations of the work, especially in areas like archival appraisal. Still, this type of Web site demonstrates the potential of the World Wide Web for providing basic educational material for any profession, especially in an easily updateable format.

While there is no counterpart records management “toolkit,” records professionals can find some Web sites that provide basic publications. UNESCO's Communication, Information and Informatics Sector (http://www.unesco.org/webworld/index.shtml), with a mission to “promote the free flow of ideas by word and image, a wider and better balanced dissemination of all forms of information contributing to the advancement of societies, without any obstacle to freedom of expression, both through the traditional media and the new electronic media and to help UNESCO's Member States, particularly the developing countries, and disadvantaged communities worldwide to strengthen their capacities in communication, information and informatics,” includes online access to many of the previously published RAMP studies. There is a chronological checklist and index of the RAMP (Records and Archives Management Program) studies, with links to HTML or PDF versions (http://www.unesco.org/webworld/ramp/rmpstd_1.htm). There are some introductory manuals of use for records professionals, such as Peter Walne, ed., Selected guidelines for the management of records and archives: A RAMP Reader, PGI-90/WS/6 (Paris, UNESCO, 1990) (http://www.unesco.org/webworld/ramp/html/r9006e/r9006e00.htm) and Murielle Doyle and Andrè Frèniére, The preparation of records management handbooks for government agencies: A RAMP study, PGI-91/WS/18 (Paris, UNESCO, 1991) (http://www.unesco.org/webworld/ramp/html/r9118e/r9118e00.htm). The UNESCO volumes are particularly valuable for their international perspective on all matters and their wide-ranging citations.

The value of the Web, of course, is that individuals can fashion their own basic readers and resources from disparate sites and materials. Starting with a basic glossary is, of course, very important. The United States Environmental Protection Agency maintains a Glossary of Common Records Management Terms, adapted from A Federal Records Management Glossary (National Archives and Records Administration, 1993), that is as good as any print glossary and easier to use (http://www.epa.gov/ngispgm3/nrmp/gloss/gloss01.htm). Glossaries are always included in the majority of basic textbooks, and records professionals could easily mimic even the best textbooks on the market using the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is constantly heralded as a source of self-education, a ready reference for nearly any topic one can imagine. Records professionals can certainly use the Web to discover all types of educational opportunities related to their responsibilities. A Web site on Educational Opportunities in museum, library, and archives conservation/preservation (http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/bytopic/education/) is a useful, although not very critical or detailed, listing of preservation education resources available on the World Wide Web. It is uncertain whether this is kept current, but it is certainly not comprehensive in its scope of coverage. Nevertheless, this is a source worth checking for additional information about education, especially for traditional conservation work of paper-based materials.

Library professor Francis Miksa believes, because of phenomenon like the Web, that we have moved into a new era where we are recovering a “private space library ideal” (Miksa). Here we can go one step further, to the point of building both virtual professional libraries or personal study guides or textbooks. A basic textbook such as Ira A. Penn, Gail B. Pennix, and Jim Coulson, Records Management Handbook, 2^nd ed. (Brookfield, Vermont: Gower, 1994) could serve as a model for building an online personal records management textbook because it s one of the most-cited textbooks in the field. In its introductory section, this publication provides an overview of the records management function, an orientation to the concept of the information or records management life cycle, and a perspective on the concept of evolving recording media. Creatively drawing on a variety of reports, journals, and policy manuals, an individual can develop a reasonable – or at least interesting – set of readings on such topics. On the records management function, we can read about the purpose of records management in the New South Wales, Government Recordkeeping Manual (http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/publicsector/rk/whatisrm/what_is_rm-02.htm) and reflect on the nature of documents in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, “The Social Life of Documents,” First Monday 1 (May 6, 1996) (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue1/documents/index.html; David M. Levy, “The Universe is Expanding: Reflections on the Social (and Cosmic) Significance of Documents in a Digital Age,” ASIS Bulletin 25 (May/June 1999), http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-99/the_universe_is_expanding___.html; and Sue McKemmish, “Evidence of Me,” http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum/smckp1.html. McKemmish writes, for example in her essay originally published in an issue of Archives and Manuscripts, that “Those of us who . . . accumulate our personal records over time are engaged in the process of forming a personal archive. The functionality of a personal archive, its capacity to witness to a life, is dependent on how systematically we go about the business of creating our records as documents, capturing them as records (ie ordering them in relation to each other and 'placing' them in the context of related activities), and keeping and discarding them over time (ie organizing them to function as long-term memory of significant activities and relationships). Archivists, in particular collecting archivists, are in part in the business of ensuring that a personal archive considered to be of value to society at large is incorporated into the collective archives of the society, and thus constitutes an accessible part of that society's memory, its experiential knowledge and cultural identity - evidence of us.”

Basic concepts, such as the information or records life cycle, have ample amounts of writings available on the World Wide Web. The State of Wisconsin Department of Administration, Managing Records During the Active and Inactive Stages of the Records Life Cycle, Records Management Fact Sheet 8: Issued:  9/23/1997, http://www.doa.state.wi.us/dsas/recordsmgt/facts8.asp, and the Georgia Secretary of State Department, Guide to Managing Public Records in Georgia, Part 2 About Your Responsibilities - The Facts of Life Cycle Management, http://www.sos.state.ga.us/archives/rms/manuals/gmprg2.htm, provide competent and traditional definitions of the concept. Anne J. Gilliland-Swetland, Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library Resources, February 2000), http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub89/contents.html, places the concept within the context of other archives and records management principles. Then we can turn to challenges to the life cycle concept, such as that represented by new technologies, such as in Greg O’Shea, “Keeping Electronic Records: Issues and Strategies,” Provenance 1 (March 1996), http://www.netpac.com/provenance/vol1/no2/features/erecs1a.htm.

O’Shea argues in this essay, “Because electronic records are software and hardware dependent and these change with time, the notion of the life-cycle management of electronic records is difficult to sustain. The life-cycle approach, based on the 'movement' of self-contained paper based records from creation through administrative use to ultimate destruction or retention, is unsatisfactory in a changing technological environment.” Finally, records professionals can read about an alternative concept, in Frank Upward, “Structuring the Records Continuum - Part One: Postcustodial principles and properties,” http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum/fupp1.html and “Structuring the Records Continuum, Part Two: Structuration Theory and Recordkeeping,” http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/rcrg/publications/recordscontinuum/fupp2.html.

Finally, concerning the evolution of recording media we have a wide array of materials. Bruce Sterling’s “Dead Media Project,” http://www.wps.com/dead-media/, is the place to start. As Sterling writes, “It's a rather rare phenomenon for an established medium to die. If media make it past their Golden Vaporware stage, they usually expand wildly in their early days and then shrink back to some protective niche as they are challenged by later and more highly evolved competitors. Radio didn't kill newspapers, TV didn't kill radio or movies, video and cable didn't kill broadcast network TV; they just all jostled around seeking a more perfect app.” Sterling continues, however, “But some media do, in fact, perish. Such as: the phenakistoscope. The teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon. The Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight spectacles. Morton Heilig's early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The various species of magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that once riddled the underground of Chicago. Was the Antikythera Device a medium? How about the Big Character Poster Democracy Wall in Peking in the early 80s?” For a more directly related writing on this topic, we can use Luciana Duranti’s well-known and oft-cited “The Odyssey of Records Managers - Part I: From the Dawn of Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire,” ARMA Quarterly (July 1989): 3-11, http://www-chs.cowan.edu.au/scis/mb/RecEnv/reader/html/module_01_02.htm; “The Odyssey of Records Managers - Part II: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times,” ARMA Quarterly (October 1989): 3-11, http://www-chs.cowan.edu.au/scis/mb/RecEnv/reader/html/module_01_03.htm. We can also draw on the efforts to digitize older journals in different disciplines, such as Harold T. Pinkett, “The Keep Commission, 1905-1909: A Rooseveltian Effort for Administrative Reform,” The Journal of American History 52 (September 1965): 297-312, accessible through http://www.jstor.org/jstor/, and describing one of the early government office recordkeeping reforms. Finally, we can have fun, using an essay such as Ian Frazier’s “Typewriter Man,” Atlantic Monthly (November 1997), http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97nov/type.htm, describing one of the last people around who can repair manual typewriters.

The opportunities to find archives and records management policies and manuals are virtually unlimited using the World Wide Web. The Web Site provided by Terry Abraham, “Repositories of Primary Sources,” (http://www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/Other.Repositories.html) provides a “listing of over 4000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar.” Constantly updated, many of these sites include examples of policies and guidelines that can be used by other archives and records management programs. The difficulty with this site illustrates one of the problems of using the Web. “Repositories of Primary Sources” is a simple linking of all available sites, organized by geographic region, and provides no information on the nature of the sites, especially if they contain information beyond a description of the repository and its holdings. You could, for example, search on the archives of a listserv that features discussions about a topic such as policies and manuals – an example is the Archives of the Archives & Archivists listserv (http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html) – or you could look for other more organized information sources. Fortunately, there are more organized information sources on the World Wide Web, such as emerging electronic journals.

It is surprising that no one has published a basic archives or records management manual online. We have gotten close. The Northeast Document Conservation Center (http://www.nedcc.org/), a nonprofit, regional conservation center, provides an online version of Sherelyn Ogden, ed., Preservation of Library & Archival Materials: A Manual, 3^rd ed. rev., published in 1999 (http://www.nedcc.org/plam3/manhome.htm). It is certainly time, however, for some professional association or a publisher to produce a basic textbook in the field that can draw on the many existing resources of the Web and integrate new materials such as audio and video commentaries on particular issues of archives and records management. We have examples of publishers releasing significant tomes in both online and print versions. The National Academy Press, for example, recently issued the 364 page report by the Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Emerging Information Infrastructure, National Research Council, The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age in a paperback book sold for $42.95 or an online version available at http://books.nap.edu/html/digital_dilemma/