Australian Computer SocietyAustralian Computer SocietyConference delegates are introduced to the issues of what an electronic documents are and how they should be managed in the age of the Internet. Results of several federal government committees on electronic document management are discussed. It is argued that daily exposure to the Internet is profoundly altering fundamental ideas of what a document is. The speakers and issues for the conference session are then introduced, using the results of an on-line, open source search.
Mr Worthington is Special Adviser for Internet/Intranet Policy, with the Australian Department of
Defence and Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society. Tom wrote the ACS
Communique on IT higher education in 1998, launched the ACS/PAGE on-line postgraduate
program in December 1997 and was a steering committee member of the Discipline Research
Strategy for Information Technology.
Tom is a member of the Australian Computer Society, voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery, member of the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Society. He is a member of the Council of Standards Australia.
Information Age magazine lists Mr. Worthington as one of the 10 most influential IT&T people in Australia in 1998. His work since 1994 has been on the policy and practice of implementation of the Internet, including appearances before three Senate hearings. He established the first web home pages for the ACT Government, the Special Broadcasting Service, Australian Information Industry Association and the National Press Club.
Contact AiC Worldwide, ph: (02) 92105727, E-mail: djarvis@aicconf.com.au
Draft of 1 June 1998: The content of this talk will be developed here. The printed version for the proceedings and "slides" will also be available. This document is: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1998/past/edm98.htm Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au
As conference chair my main job is to make sure the speakers, and the audience, keep to the timetable and to the topic. However, to put this part of the conference in context, let me ask the question: What exactly are Document Management and Information Management in the on-line age?
As chair it isn't my job to answer those questions, just ask them. But let me try.
In 1995, I spent several months chairing a federal government interdepartmental committee (1) of library, records management, IT and archivists experts on the issue of electronic document management.
- Documents are recorded communication with recognisable structure, on any medium, intelligible without further processing except for presentation on screen or on the printed page. Not all documents, however, are records in the archival or legal sense.
- Records are recorded evidence of agency or individual functions, activities and transactions. To be evidence a record must have content, context and structure, and be a part of a record-keeping system.
From: Improving Electronic Document Management - Guidelines For Australian Government Agencies (1)
In the end I was less than clear as to what was an electronic record versus an electronic document. Since 1995 I have stopped worrying about what the difference between a document and record is or what an electronic document is. I just use them.
My operational definition for a document would be "a collection of information assembled for viewing by a person". These documents, in electronic format, need not have a long life-span. They can be assembled for one viewing and then destroyed. The components of the document can be from widely dispersed and diverse sources. The authors of the components of a document are not necessarily involved in the creation of the document. This may sound strange and exotic, but it is the every day reality of on-line electronic document management.
Almost all my correspondence these days is electronic mail (e-mail). Each day I receive about 100 messages and send about 20. To handle this volume, I use a very disciplined approach (11) to e-mail. More sophisticated e-mail management tools would help with this, but I make do with what standard e-mail and file managers provide.
Now I only get about two or three pieces of paper mail a day. This is after three years of asking people to e-mail me (and threatening not to do business with them if they didn't). I only need to send a piece of paper mail about once a week.
In place of written papers and slide presentations, I use the web. This includes defence and interdepartmental policy work. For security reasons some material is not on the Internet, but is in the same format on intranets.
Every day I do web searches for policy material, send out requests for comment on drafts and download material from other from review. Occasionally I even do travel web pages in a high technology tourist series (12).
This daily exposure to the Internet has profoundly altered my idea of what a document is. The documents I create are composites of links to other documents from diverse sources. They incorporate graphics from servers around the world and contain links to, and are linked from, documents in other places. These documents evolve during the life of a project. There are multiple expressions of the same document (such as the web page, for-print and slide-show versions of this document). Paper documents seem ephemeral and insubstantial in comparison. The concept of a piece of paper with marks on it being a real document now seems a bizarre idea.
Hopefully by the end of the day we might have some more answers, or at least some more questions about what electronic documents are.
But first to see how electronic today's speakers really are; my first step was to do a web search and weave some information about them into this document. Here are some of the items I found on-line with a few minutes searching.
Here are excerpts of a few items a search of our conference speakers and their organisations found:
With Optus MultiNet Access IP, major enterprises can now realise the unlimited business potential of the Internet via powerful broadband access. A commercial-grade direct access Internet service, Access IP can provide your organisation with World Wide Web, email, FTP file transfer, and USENET news facilities. And because it is backed by Optus' carrier-grade service and technology, you can be confident that Access IP delivers the superior performance demanded by corporate organisations ó with high bandwidth, flexible billing, guaranteed access and the reliability of Optus' nationwide MultiNet broadband network.
From: Optus Web Service - Internet Services (2).
I found about 2,000 references to myself, but most were from my own web documents. Here's one by someone else:
The future from the present--Australia in 2005
In his paper, 'Australia: the Networked Nation', Tom Worthington attempts a prophecy of the Australia of 2005.href 1 In this image the construction of city freeways and airports was halted in 1998, partly because of the Net, and partly for environmental reasons. 'People walk or bicycle to their local neighbourhood cybercafé.' As a corollary there has been a move back to the country, since 'information workers' could now tele-commute. Most business, including farming, is conducted over the Net. Economically, Australia has come 'to dominate the post-industrial world', due to the 'café lead [sic] recovery. The advent of networking and cheap computing required a looser management style, this suited the Australian lifestyle.'
From: Australian Studies into the 21st Century (3).
Barbara Reed BA(Hons) Syd MA(Hons) Melb. GradDipARchADmin N.S.W.
Prior to joining DLAR as a Senior Lecturer in 1994, Barbara worked as a consultant in the recordkeeping industries for 10 years. She has extensive experience both in the private sector and in government records environments, with interests focused particularly on electronic recordkeeping and strategic integration of recordkeeping into business processes. Formal professional appointments have been with Australian Archives and then at the University of Melbourne Records Management Unit.
From: Course Team - Master of Information Management" (4).
Federal Health Minister Dr Michael Wooldridge today threw his support behind an Internet-based national health data initiative developed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), describing it as 'clever, innovative and a boon for health data managers around the country'.Launching the product to coincide with the AIHW's tenth birthday celebrations, Dr Wooldridge said the National Health Information Knowledgebase was an interactive electronic storage site for national health metadata, or 'data about data'...
From: Wooldridge Backs Internet Health Data Initiative (5).
Martin Ader a créé en avril 1996 la société Workflow & Groupware Stratégies (W&GS) spécialisée dans le conseil aux entreprises dans l’utilisation des techniques de groupe. Il est le représentant de la Workflow Management Coalition en France...
From: Martin Ader, sa biographie (6).
Translated using Alta Vista's Automated Service (7), this is:
Martin Ader created in April 1996 the company Workflow & Groupware Stratégies (W&GS) specialized in the consulting with the companies in the use of the techniques of group. He is the representative of Workflow Management Coalition in France...
My job is: To Promote the Security of Australia, and to Protect its People and its Interests, as it says on the Defence Home Page (8). Providing national security is a very specialised application for information management. As well as the obvious public relations information provided to the public, the Defence Department uses specialised classified intranets and web services to conduct military operations (9). You will find details of this in my paper (10) for the conference. I hope that and other presentations today will be of value.
