Strategies for Managing Electronic Records

Christina Perris
INFO 266
Fall 2015

Bantin, Philip C. (1998). Strategies for managing electronic records: A new archival paradigm? An affirmation of our archival traditions? Archival Issues: Journal of the Midwest Archives Conference, 23(1), 17-34.

Strategies for Managing Electronic Records

This academic journal article explores the existing strategies for managing electronic records and whether existing archival management paradigms for “analog records” – in other words, hard-copy records – will be compatible.  The author presents the two record management paradigms – the life-cycle model, as advanced by Theodore R. Schellenberg, which advances that records exist along a pattern of creation like a living organism, and the records continuum model, in which the record’s usefulness is viewed as constant and unchanging.  After he summarizes the basics of electronic records and how they are appraised for their potential research value, Bentin explores the prevailing arguments within the information professions as to whether these record management paradigms can be applied to electronic records.  Bentin arrives at the conclusion that it is still too early in our collective experience of managing electronic records to outright dismiss any records management paradigm.

As an information professional who works with and is currently preparing to certify as a digital archives specialist, the management of electronic records is a relatively speaking “new” concept for information professionals to begin to seriously consider.  With the inevitable march of technology, which has brought us new advances in data storage technologies from high-capacity flash and hard drives to seemingly-limitless cloud storage, the massive growth of electronic records is creating a crisis in electronic data management in par with the one that faced some of the United States archivists in the early 1920’s as they assessed the nation’s repositories, part of which were held on overloaded, swaybacked shelving in the garage of the White House.  The caution afforded in the article is simple: we should not discount any possible record management paradigm for dealing with electronic records.