Needed Actions by Records Professionals in Using the Web. Throughout this technical report, I have made many allusions to an agenda for archivists and records managers and their use of the World Wide Web. Below I have summarized and elaborated a bit more on these activities.

Bind the Records Professions (Back) Together. Although it is difficult to imagine when we consider the differences between archivists and records managers, these two types of records professionals share common origins and common agendas. More than thirty years ago, Frank Evans suggested that archivists and records managers “have too much to do in fully accepting our own responsibilities, and in learning from each other, to spend time arguing over our differences” (Evans, 57). Yet, archivists and records managers continue to read their own journals, attend their own meetings, and focus on their own tightly defined areas today. A generation after Evans’s essay, a study of records management programs in academe suggested that the interest by university archivists in records management was limited to a “simple desire to improve archival documentation,” an interest that might “actually undermine the development of viable programs that serve administrative informational needs” (Skemer and Williams, 546-547).

So, how can we use the World Wide Web to erase some of these differences, or, at the least, to build some new bridges between archivists and records managers or between records professionals and other information disciplines? The baseline structure of the Web, with hyper-linking, will allow us to build some Web sites cross-referencing some common or related areas. The key is picking a topic, key professional function, or area of debate and controversy to use as a starting point. Building a Web site on the appraisal of records, for example, would provide the opportunity to compare and contrast archival appraisal with records management’s scheduling function. Such a site could also expand its links to include collection development in librarianship and museuology. Building a common Web site on the education of records professionals, especially one providing links to online syllabi would be another opportunity for comparing educational and training approaches in the two fields, creating a means to identify common threads that might aid both disciplines.

We could become as creative with such a Web site as we wanted, since there are no barriers for doing so on the World Wide Web. Like Amazon.com where readers are invited to submit reviews of books they have read, we could ask records experts to write reviews of publications, linked Web sites, and other sources relating to areas of convergence in the work of records managers and archivists. It would be interesting to have an archivist review a records management text and a records manager to evaluate an archival monograph. In other words, we can harness the World Wide Web to develop a continuing exchange of views on the relationship between various segments of the records community. Such efforts could also be part of a bigger clearinghouse for the records discipline.

Establish a Web-based Clearinghouse for Archivists and Records Managers. Throughout this technical report I made references for an improvement in finding Web sites relevant for the work of records professionals. Archivists and records managers – perhaps led by professional associations like ARMA, NAGARA, and SAA – could think about developing some sort of World Wide Web based clearinghouse, one that is either commercial or one that is supported as a free professional service. Steven Brill’s recent founding of Contentville.com (http://www.contentville.com/) provides an example of a site that asks people to pay as they go and use different services. The site brings together online magazines, books, dissertations, and other information sources in a searchable format. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Web site noted “Contentville.com has developed relationships with a number of companies to provide such material, including EBSCO and Primedia for magazine and journal subscriptions, Bell & Howell for dissertations, and Libris for rare books. It will also sell electronic books.” The article surmised that the “site works a bit like a library catalog, allowing customers to search for resources on a particular topic. The site then provides an eclectic list of books, dissertations, historic speeches, and other relevant material, along with their prices” (Blumenstyk). Perhaps if the various professional associations joined forces and sought external funding support, at least initial start-up funds, such a clearinghouse could be developed.

We have some existing programs supporting what could become such a Clearinghouse. The National Archives supports the Archives Library Information Center (ALIC) with “web pages . . . designed to provide NARA staff and researchers nationwide with convenient access to content beyond the physical holdings of our two traditional libraries. ALIC provides access to information on American history and government, archival administration, information management, and government documents to NARA staff, archives and records management professionals, and the general public” (http://www.nara.gov/alic/). While much of ALIC is devoted to topics beyond archives and records management, such as American history resources, there is a considerable quantity of bibliographies, full-text materials (such as from Prologue, NARA’s quarterly journal), training resources, and other sources. The good design and ease of use of the Web site provides a lesson in designing useful Web sites, and, perhaps, could provide a foundation for a broader or more comprehensive clearinghouse for archivists and records management. Just this kind of function was suggested twenty years ago, however, and the fact that a more deliberate effort has not developed suggests that, with the advent of the Web, the time is ripe for another effort (Walch).

The present work of NAGARA in publishing its Clearinghouse newsletter, and providing its text fully online is another exemplary effort of this ilk. The newsletter includes news about the association, from the National Archives, and then a state-by-state review of activities. The Clearinghouse issues are included as pdf files, making them difficult to use and impossible to follow Web sites mentioned in the publication. Still, the simple design and straightforward news reporting could easily be emulated in a Web clearinghouse, simply by expanding beyond the parameters of government programs to include all archives and records management operations and all records professionals.

Develop New Kinds of Online Records Management Textbooks. In this report I described how there were many pieces of what could make up a kind of surrogate basic textbook already available on the Web. The kind of clearinghouse function described above could provide assistance in generating such a basic textbook, perhaps organizing its links along the lines of a table of contents of such a volume. It is about time for records professionals and their professional associations to notch up their thinking about delivering basic reference sources in their field.

A recent article in the New York Times about a new form of Internet publishing may be useful for helping records managers and archivists to re-think their own literature. Linda Guernsey reports that “This fall . . . a few hundred [books] will take a new form on the Internet. They will be sold in component parts -- chapters, maps and even paragraphs -- that can be mixed and matched. Readers will be invited to create customized books by picking pieces of content à la carte from an array of already-published guides at, say, $5 a chapter instead of $20 a book. Buyers will have the option of receiving their books electronically or ordering them printed, bound and delivered to their door.” The article mentioned one company, Primis Custom Publishing (http://www.mhhe.com/primis/) already providing such a service for college level textbooks in twenty disciplines.

Now how do we translate such an approach into producing a records management textbook? We can consider that many of our supporting professional associations have published brief texts on specific archival or records management functions, such as SAA’s archival fundamental series, that are limited in their ability to serve as a full textbook (and create manifold problems for educators who wish to use them in their classrooms). What if SAA updated these volumes (they need to be updated having been published in the first half of the 1990’s) and published them both as traditional print texts and offered them in a way that individuals could design their own textbooks for their own customized use at an affordable price but a price that could be a money maker for the Society? Professional associations could do the same by digitizing their journals, or they could be strategic in identifying seminal writings that could be made available for the production of basic readers. Given the range of topics in journals such as the American Archivist or the Records Management Quarterly (now the Information Management Journal), this could be a tremendous service for the profession.

Encourage the Better Design of Web Sites for Records Professionals. One of the greatest obstacles to using the World Wide Web is, besides locating sources, making sense of what someone has found. Any experienced Web user will relate stories of time lost following links that turn out to be useless. While we seem to be far more tolerant of wasted time on the Web, few can really tolerate such problems when they are trying to use the Web for time-sensitive work-related problem solving and projects. I have found very few Web sites with an archives and records management orientation that are designed well for use. They tend to be lists of Web sites, with little critical information concerning their content, potential value, or relationship to other information sources. We have not adopted our own concerns for context, exhibited in our records work, for Web sites.

There are many Web designers and consultants who have described the first level of problems records professionals face in designing their Web sites. Vincent Flanders writes, “Many sites contain ego-stroking mission statements and corporate bios that prove the company forgot the purpose of a Web site -- to solve my problems. Your Web site is not about showing how clever and smart you think you are or how good you are because you're out saving the whales or how much time you spend doing pro bono work for lepers. Your Web site has to solve my problems . . . . And since this is the Web, I want someone who can solve my problems now!” (Flanders). Simple listings of Web sites are not solving any problems because such lists are not addressing any challenges. Records professionals need to organize and design their Web sites as if they are addressing issues confronting the management of records, and I believe this can be accomplished in two ways.

The first way is to provide concise descriptions that can be understood before individuals go clicking around the World Wide Web. This is similar to what an abstract is intended to do. An abstract is defined as “A brief summary of a work which tells enough to allow a reader to decide whether or not it has the information sought; in many cases, it also contains keywords and/or terms used to index the work so that it can be retrieved” (see http://www.sir.arizona.edu/school/glossary.html). There is even a standard for abstracting, “ANSI Z39.14-1979, Writing Abstracts, provides guidance on identifying ‘the basic content of a document quickly and accurately’ and describing the document in such a way that users can ‘determine its relevance to their interests, and . . . decide whether they need to read the document in its entirety.’ Although this standard is designed to apply only to abstracts of printed materials (in such contexts as the abstract preceding a scholarly article in a journal or the annotation of an entry in a bibliographic database), it covers processes resembling those used by archivists in preparing the narrative portions of series and collection descriptions. The international equivalent is ISO 214:1976, Documentation--Abstracts for publications and documentation” (Walch, 1995, chapter five). Archivists and records managers need to build Web sites that include such abstracts as part of the links enabling people using the site to be able to manage their time wisely by knowing what it is they will be looking at. However, they need to design these sites so that they are not loaded with text and so poorly designed that no one can figure out how to use the site’s resources.

Good visual design is another necessity for creating useful Web sites. Some months ago I was surprised to see hundreds of people attending Edward Tufte’s design seminars primarily because of their concern about what is happening with Web sites (you can read a summary of Tufte’s ideas at a Web site entitled “Graphics and Web Design Based on Edward Tufte's Principles” at http://www.washington.edu/computing/training/560/zz-tufte.html). Without belaboring the point here, it seems to me that we can use the Web to represent graphically key ideas and the genealogy of concepts with appropriate links. A site built around the evolution of archival appraisal concepts could track parallel and related ideas reflecting how macro-appraisal concepts evolved. A site on electronic records research could be constructed so that the apparently opposing British Columbia and Pittsburgh projects could be better related so that common ideas and origins, divergent principles, and related concepts can be seen. These visualizations could include links then to the appropriate Web sites, projects, research articles, and the like.