By Janice Schulz
Ever since those lovely punch cards were introduced to organizations as a business tool in the 1940s, records managers have faced unique dilemmas, challenging us to fit new electronic methods into our old models of recordkeeping or to come up with new ways of managing information and technologies. Admittedly, the lightning fast pace of technological advancement oftentimes catches us unaware and we end up backtracking and trying to catch up after realizing that the new media is producing information that needs to be managed. From punch card automation to mainframes to personal computers to mobile devices, each new technology has presented new issues and has required us to think creatively about how to deal with their related records.
The Ohio Electronic Records Committee (OhioERC) tackles these challenges by researching issues and crafting guidelines for Ohio’s government and government-funded organizations to use in their own policy and procedure creation. As UC Records Manager, I have been a member of the OhioERC since 2006, serving as Secretary from 2008-2012. For me, this experience has been extremely valuable and frankly very eye-opening as I am exposed to quandaries others are facing and we may face very well in the future at UC. The first quarterly meeting of 2013 was held on Wednesday, January 16, at the Ohio History Center in Columbus. The Committee is very close to releasing a new guideline on cloud computing and an updated version of the Electronic Records Management guideline, one of the very first produced. A subcommittee is working to update the current Managing Web Content guideline and discussion ensued about the need to update the current Managing Email guideline.