literally. Went up to Hutchinson, Kansas yesterday to see the Underground Salt Museum that has recently opened there. Amazing place, especially for anyone interested in long-term secure records storage….. almost all of the Hollywood studios, lots of financial services firms, many medical records places, and even some foreign governments contract to have their most vital information stored in this location 650 feet underneath the Kansas prairie. A little scary going down, when they issue you a hard hat and an emergency breathing apparatus, and tell you that they can turn on the lights in the mineshaft elevator if anyone in the group can’t stand the “deep dark”! However, once you get down there, it’s like an enormous underground parking garage, huge enough to run trams for the tour, plenty of lights, high ceilings, the floor nicely smooth (made of “saltcrete”) in the main areas, and the walls very shiny from the salt crystals. Looks like a great place for rollerblading (if only they’d allow it!)
“Integrating Information lifecycles” redux, courtesy of this article from Law.com about “RAM discovery”:
“If temporary or ephemeral information is not routinely retained, the emerging common law principle is that the requesting party must take effective affirmative action, including, when necessary, the seeking of a preservation order, to require that a producing party place transitory information into a form from which production can later be made.”
Adaptive structuration, anyone? (Note: this Lego set of Anthony Giddens in his study is not from an official Lego site.)
I had been aware of this exhibit before I left upstate New York, as the grounds of the former Willard Psychiatric Institute aren’t too far north of Ithaca, and I used to drive past them occasionally. As I continue to think about the so-called records continuum, however, this “baggage” seems to weigh increasingly heavily on me in accounting for organizational documentation, both economic and evidentiary. Exemplary evidence: I suspect that it symbolizes a great deal in terms of the actual “human capital” “used” in the workings of any organizational recordkeeping system.
Here is Frank Upward’s Records Continuum model and two of his seminal papers:
Structuring the Records Continuum, Part One
Structuring the Records Continuum, Part Two
Of course, what I’m really interested in isn’t here: it’s what informs the “actor’s” decision-making that precipitates the “act” (at which point the documentation process starts in this model.) In fact, you might call the missing (non-archival) part of the model: reinventing relevance.
