Recordkeeping Informatics for a Networked Age

“Without the adequate presence of Recordkeeping Informatics that produce evidence of actions we will be left with information sludge and an environment of increasing chaos – an environment that places us all at risk of underhand practices, unwelcome social consequences, and at a professional loss as to how to operate within the reality of increasingly complex digital ecologies.” The focus of this book becomes more relevant to governance every day as rational and scientific thought flounders under the weight of post-truth politics and a welter of ‘alternative facts’. Traditional values of openness, transparency and accountability also face new challenges from technical change. Recordkeeping informatics supports archiving processes and few challenges are of greater significance for the survival of humanity than the adequate formation of archives that serve spacetime management, mutual associations and life chances: the major elements of authoritative information resource management as defined by the sociologist Anthony Giddens. The authors of this book as practitioners and as academics have witnessed and analysed the way changing technologies and the expanding continuum of recorded information have contributed to the disruption of normality in governance. Over time they have developed ideas about the relationship between social functioning, informatics, and the ethics of recordkeeping practices and in this book they use their thinking about archival practices to present a new teamwork and Internet based business application approach that can help a recordkeeping mind to develop and help usher in a new era of cyber-maturity.