Ethical Retention Policies or Information Anxiety?

It’s the quintessential records management question – what should I keep and for how long?  Now there are lots of different opinions on this one with one of the most interesting coming from the fantastically named Big Men on Content (a group for me if ever there was one).  Lee Dallas of that parish made out the case for keeping everything saying that this amounted to an ethical retention policy because knowing that all records will be kept forever would make an organisation behave in an appropriate manner at all times – “it is probably just the right thing to do” he says in an excellent article you can see at http://bit.ly/nPp4cK.  Whilst this is an interesting point of view, it is not one that I agree with – and I’m not sure that the records managers I know would agree either.   The natural extension of the argument is that any kind of retention / deletion schedule has some element of dishonesty about it or is, at best, a little disingenuous.  Most of the people who actually draw up retention schedules in real life would, I think, take issue with that.

And then there’s the practical issue of actually finding stuff, which is where the corporate becomes personal – see the excellent article in Management Week by Lynne Brindley (http://bit.ly/vlpylb) discussing strategies for managers to reduce what she calls “information anxiety” – too much information in too many formats.  Her concluding observation is that that “curation might be taking over from search” as the method by which you find the information you need.   Curation – the idea of assessment, assignment of value and relevance and subsequent retention of the most valuable and relevant.  Familiar?  Sounds a bit like records management to me and a better, and equally ethical, alternative to keeping everything forever.