At some point, every specialist must complain about how their colleagues and clients “just don’t understand” what they do. But a particularly common version of this complaint today is the “recordkeeper’s lament”: Why don’t IT projects take record keeping requirements into account with new systems? How will we find records from these systems in 10 years time? Don’t these people know we are subject to record keeping legislation?

Up until recently, most business systems either relied upon paper processes or treated electronic records as paper analogues (for example, the fundamental metaphor of email is that of the memo sent and received in electronic form). But once transactions and processes could be completed 100% electronically, systems designers began to understand that information can be stored and represented in far more dimensions than the two dimensions accessible on a sheet of paper.

In these born-digital information environments with umpteen terabytes of storage, traditional “file and document” metaphors of record keeping often seem all but irrelevant. Indeed to many IT people steeped in databases and working with adaptive, fluid user interfaces, the concepts might as well be in a foreign language.

The disconnectedness of record keeping approaches and IT first became apparent in the late 1990s. However, 15 years later the problem is now starkly obvious. The explosion in anytime, anyplace retrieval and submission of information through multiple devices over the Internet means that fully digital transactions are becoming not just possible, but common. How can a system correctly manage its records when nothing that looks like a traditional record even exists?

This is what ISO 16175 attempts to address. Sponsored by the International Council of Archives, ISO 16175 is a set of functional requirements which explain how organisations can design their business and EDRMS systems to achieve record keeping compliance. ISO 16175 explicitly targets audiences who are non-expert in record keeping such as systems developers and vendors, standards-setting bodies, and government agency officials. Unlike ISO 15489, the newer ISO 16175 publication is a “Babel fish” standards document which tries to explain the need for record keeping and its requirements in a broader IT systems context.  (The Babel fish, for those who missed out on Douglas Adams’ comedy sci-fi series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, automatically translates any spoken language into the language of the listener.) 

The National Archives of Australia (NAA) has been promoting ISO 16175 heavily, with its Digital Transition Policy requiring that federal government agencies give “preference” to systems that comply with the ISO 16175 standard. The NAA explains its recommended use of the standard as follows:

The National Archives of Australia endorses the use of this standard by Australian Government agencies [to] maximise consistency across agencies in software used to create and manage digital records ... review the records management functionality, or assess the compliance of an existing system ... identify records management functionality to include in a design specification when building, upgrading or acquiring new systems ... The [NAA] encourages software vendors to self-assess their products against the standard.

As you might expect for a standard sponsored by archivists, ISO 16175 tends to privilege the preferences of archivists over immediate business needs. For example, it states that systems should “rely on standardised metadata” (principle 6), “ensure interoperability across platforms and domains and over time” (principle 7), and “have the capacity for bulk import and export using open formats” (principle 9). Some of the mandatory requirements, such as those around exporting records, do also seem to fall into the trap of expecting records to be convertible back into a more traditional “file and document” model.

However, ISO 16175 does provide a great deal of flexibility for organisations to choose how the requirements of the standard can be met. The flipside of this flexibility is that two vendors claiming ISO 16175 compliance of their system could mean very different things! Which brings us back to communication. As a standard, ISO 16175 may not detail a single solution. But it does provide a common framework to discuss the constraints of systems designers and the requirements of records managers in a way that each can better understand.  And if a better shared understanding of records and information systems is the main achievement of ISO 16175, that would still be a substantial success.

Stephen Bounds is Director and Principal Consultant at knowquestion, an information and knowledge management consultancy. http://knowquestion.com.au