Managing the Crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World

Citation

Sanderson, K. (2009), "Managing the Crowd: Rethinking Records Management for the Web 2.0 World", The Electronic Library, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 189-190. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470910934885

In this fast moving and very readable volume Steve Bailey questions the continued validity of many current records management practices in an environment where the technology used to create and store information has changed almost beyond recognition from that used during the profession's foundation years over half a century ago. The practices developed by authoritarian bureaucracies faced with the need to manage burgeoning quantities of paper no longer work, and the effect of modern information technology has been to increase the individual employee's power to control information at the expense of the organisation.

Bailey argues that the balance of power between the organisation and the individual will shift even further in favour of the individual as Web 2.0 becomes more pervasive. He sets a scenario where an organisation makes a deliberate decision to create and store its information using Web 2.0 services in preference to maintaining its own servers and purchasing licences to run proprietary applications, a scenario where records are dispersed amongst a number of external providers. The problem this presents for records managers is self‐evident. However, Bailey argues that strategies for tackling this and other problems currently testing the profession (e.g. the difficulty of appraising records for their informational value) can be found in the same technologies. He observes that users of Web 2.0 services readily share their information resources and tag them to mark their significance and aid future retrieval. These are behaviours which records managers currently struggle to elicit within their organisations. In Bailey's scenario, employees respond to the switch to Web 2.0 services by bringing the altruism of the Web into the office; records managers should be able to harness this goodwill and “use the wisdom of the crowd to manage the crowd.”

The assumptions implicit in this scenario (that organisations will outsource and disperse their information storage and that individuals who use Web 2.0 technologies in their personal lives are representative of the working population) are open to question. Furthermore Bailey's claim that records managers turn a blind eye to information contained in systems where capture of records is difficult may raise antipodean hackles. However, to focus on these issues would be to miss the point of Bailey's book. Records managers are struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change and to create recordkeeping cultures within their own organisations. Traditional practices may indeed no longer be “fit for purpose”, and strategies which either utilise Web 2.0 services or are modelled on them may provide solutions to some of the problems confronting the profession. This book covers a lot of ground and is sometimes provocative, but there is also good sense and vision here. Bailey's purpose was to provoke thought and he does that. Managing the Crowd is recommended for anybody interested in the future of recordkeeping, and that includes archivists concerned with the capture of personal digital records.