Mid Sweden University

Swedish strategies and legislation that govern the management of records and archives in organizations have their roots in an analogue and paper-based environment. Today, very few records are created on paper: the majority of records are born digital, but they may be transformed to analogue form to fit organizational business needs and workflow. In a records management system of the highest quality electronic records should be maintained in their digital format to preserve context, digital links and dynamic relationships among information held in databases and multimedia documents. These relationships are frequently lost in any attempt to transfer to analogue form, thus compromising best practice records management standards.

To meet the new need for managing born-digital records, many organizations have implemented electronic record management systems, and the effect of those implementations has gained interest from researchers, but it is not solely a software system that is needed to give a capacity of electronic record management. The ISO 15489 Standard for Records Management argues that the organizational structure and work processes affect how well the organization is able to manage their electronic records.

This paper is based upon a research in a Swedish municipality, which carried out a comprehensive change management process to increase their capacity to manage electronic records, both for supporting business needs and long-term preservation needs. There is very little archival literature that focuses on how the roles of both archivists and record managers change, for example as a consequence of implementing electronic document management systems, and the organization becomes a process-oriented organization. The purpose of this paper aims to increase knowledge of the way the records managers need to change their work in order to meet the requirements generated by increased capacity in electronic records management.

The research is based upon a qualitative approach where questionnaires, individual interviews, and group interviews have been used as data collection techniques. The research is in progress and has not yet fully been analyzed. However, the preliminary results indicate that the records managers need to act more proactively to meet the new system’s requirements of them. The importance of the records managers’ role in the municipality has become clearer and their competence is acknowledged as being more important as a result of this change management process in the municipality. The records managers are important in the sense that they know what information and what records are created, received and needed in different parts of the municipality. Records managers’ “record keeping” responsibilities have been better defined after this change process and their role in relation to areas that were traditionally the responsibility of archivists has also been more clearly delineated.