Postscript to June 30, 1996 Note: “Metro Airport Reflections on the Electronic Records R & D

by Richard E. Barry
Barry Associates, 3808 North Albemarle Street; Arlington, Virginia  22207 USA
Tel:+703/241-3808; Fax: +703/241-7968 
E-mail: <rickbarry@aol.com> or <rbarry@erols.com>
Welcome to World Wide Web Homepage: http://www.rbarry.com

April 27, 1997

The attached note reflected thoughts on research and development in electronic records management that I shared with the organizers of the June 1996 Ann Arbor meeting on Electronic Records Research and Development.  [By the time of the May 1997 AMI conference, the report of the Ann Arbor meeting should be available at URL <http://www.si.umich.edu/e-recs/>].  I would like to add one virtual footnotes to my 6/30/96 note and a few words on thoughts since that time.  

Correction

As a matter of correction, in the discussion of massively parallel processing, I mentioned that the last of the U.S. supercomputer companies “Thinking Machines and Cray, have since disappeared with the latest buy-out of Cray by Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI).”   In fact, Cray has retained its name within SGI.

Since Ann Arbor

Engaging the Private Sector:  In my note for Ann Arbor, I raised the importance of engaging the private sector in carrying out research and development in ERM.  It is increasingly clear that to tackle the issues surrounding electronic records management we shall have to engage the private sector both in its research and development activities and in the development of new systems.  This does not diminish in any way the R&D work funded by NHPRC, which must continue, but it suggests a somewhat different agenda and independent and parallel efforts that must be undertaken to more fully integrate recordkeeping concerns into private sector behavioral and information science research and in the development of information technologies (IT) and related standards efforts. While some initiatives have been made to engage the private sector, much more needs to be done. Business archivists can help to facilitate such efforts, but a frontal attack is needed to break into the R&D and systems development enclaves of business. We cannot continue to lament the inadequacy of recordkeeping functionality in IT products while at the same time restricting the discussion of ERM issues largely to the ARM community and, within that, largely to the government and academic sectors.  

WWW and Intranets:  Since the attached note was written, I have become even more convinced about the increasing importance of World Wide Web (WWW) technology, and its application to intranets and the implications and opportunities this entails for the preservation of records, the delivery of archives and records management (ARM) services and in electronic records management (ERM) more generally.  While many ARM specialists are worrying about how best to capture WWWpages as records, raising some of the same concerns surrounding data bases, I wonder why we cannot harness the Web technology to deliver recordkeeping services.  These thoughts are further discussed in an article on the subject: “Catching the Multimedia Intranet Train Before it Leaves the Station” in  THE RECORD, September 1996, NARA, Washington D.C., also attached.  [The full text of that article is accessible at URL <http://www.rbarry.com/> under the Recent and Upcoming Papers and Engagements section.] 

Metro Airport Reflections on the Electronic Records R & D

Rick Barry
6/30/96

A couple of years ago, the Electronic Records Research and Development Agenda (ERMR&D) was on the program for the SAA meeting in Indianapolis.  Prior to the meeting, I became engaged in an e-mail conversation with some of the panelists for that session.  This note draws from an EM that I sent during that conversation expressing views on the agenda.  It is updated some to reflect developments in the past two years in the ways in which business is done -- e.g., to reflect the evolving use of World-Wide-Web technology in the changing workplace and the potential it has for delivering electronic records -- and to reflect some more recent reflections on the nature of research, what some people call “research on research” or “R on R”. 

This note suggests the addition of an <opportunity> extension on the current research and development agenda ‘file’ for electronic records management.  The information management metaphor is used to stress, perhaps more than we have, the need to look upon information technology, and the producers of that technology, less as “the problem environment” and more as potential vehicles for addressing archives and records management (ARM) concerns.  It speaks, but is not limited to, the 1991 NHPRC Research Agenda for Electronic Records, as later augmented in 1995.  It views the agenda as a way of emphasizing the need to mine and promote ERMR&D more generally, including elsewhere in the public and private sectors and the potential roles of NHPRC, NARA and professional associations in the U.S. and internationally.  Nothing said here is meant to diminish or greatly change that agenda which is beginning to produce excellent fruit, except to suggest that some NHPRC resources be devoted to a coordination role in promoting and thus leveraging research investments by others. Hopefully the success of the NHPRC program to date will become even more apparent at the upcoming Michigan conference and the SAA conference in August. 

Looking at the Dark Side as Well as the Bright Side of Research

Having said that, we should be conservative in our conclusions about the success of the research agenda to date.  Firstly, it is very early to evaluate research results, even for some of the early projects.  Secondly, more accurate assessments can be made only after the results of research that has been done can be implemented in a sustainable, non-grant, situation. Thirdly, it is much easier to document successes than failures.  It is difficult to get people to talk -- much less write -- about failures, especially ones for which they share responsibility.  The incentives are all in the other direction.  (Could this in part be because of the emphasis that the ARM community has placed on the role of records as evidence?  :^))   If so, who among us would be anxious to designate documents as records that might come back to bite us later on as part of the institutional memory.)  Lastly, no one wants to declare a project even a partial failure if doing so might be seen to be career limiting or damaging to his or her professional reputation.  And even for the insightful and courageous ones who are able to observe and willing to share failings with their professional colleagues, in many cases they would be prevented from doing so because of requirements to obtain senior level management or public relations clearances of papers for publication or planned conference presentations. Similarly, no manager in the clearance process wants to endorse any characterization that might result in budgetary or staffing cuts or stimulate an audit that might make them the object of organizational embarrassment; and few grant agencies highlight failures in their annual reports to their own funding agencies, let alone reward grantees of such projects with follow-on grants.  

Thought about in these terms, there are some rather monumental obstacles to the whole learning process stemming from research.  Yet, anyone who has ever been involved in a complex project -- most particularly in the information management and technology area -- knows that things do go wrong and those things sometimes offer better learning experiences for those involved and better lessons for future implementers than do the success stories.  Thus, it is important to see some of the dark side of projects that all projects have and to ensure a proper balance in the reporting and dissemination of  the research results. This is especially true because research projects often are conducted under the conditions most conducive to success, where there is strong management support, abnormal financial resources brought about  by the existence of grant money that is not normally present in most organizations that will have to make use of lessons learned in such projects. Thus, one excellent area for potential research would be an independent review of research projects that were completed at least two years ago.  Beyond that, we can recognize that these are issues facing all fields of research, and we draw from the experience of other fields of research to help minimize these concerns.  What are some approaches used by researchers in other fields to tackle these questions?  They often have the work carried out by external researchers.  They try to replicate experiments in other settings to see if the results are consistent.  They set out performance measures in advance of project implementation that are amenable to evaluation by the funding agency.  Some of these approaches are more amenable to research in the physical sciences than they are to ERMR&D to be sure, but that does not minimize the need draw lessons about the research process from other disciplines and think about what might work in this field.

On another R on R topic, we would do well to consider different venues for making ERMR&D research happen.  Some of the areas needing research will require vast sums of money that can only be provided by large government labs or well endowed private sector labs.  Others can be carried out by operational organizations with NHPRC funding, such as those that will be reported on in Ann Arbor and San Diego.  Other research, however, may be quite suitable to very small grants to graduate students.  An agenda item that is very high on the importance scale, is not necessarily high on the dollar scale.

Applying Some ‘Out-of-Box’ Thinking to the Agenda

Understandably, the research agenda has focused on the first and most obvious research items as it should have.  Perhaps in the next phase of research some not so obvious areas where research is already going on in other fields that could have significant payoff for the archives and records management practice.  A few such possibilities are outlined below.

Natural Language Processing/Computational Linguistics
          
Considerable research is going on in the field of natural language processing and computational linguistics (Xerox, IBM, Dragon Systems, etc.)  Most of it related to automated speech recognition and language translation -- a good deal of it probably supporting intelligence applications.  NHPRC might find it possible to leverage its relatively small research budget by approaching some of these research activities (through NIST or directly) and say:  we know you are doing research in the computational linguistics area.  Based upon some preliminary research conducted in the Swiss Federal Archives, we believe that this area of research could yield an important payoff for electronic records management that could have very broad application and interest in addressing one of the major roadblocks to making large-scale ERM a practical reality --  automatic document classification. We propose contributing say $200-500K to your lab for your use in this application area as the focal point of part of your planned research.  Do what you are going to do anyway, but use the ARM application area as the cadaver.  
          
Very Large Scale Storage and MPP
          
Considerable benefits might be achieved in the use of massively parallel processing (MPP, a.k.a., super-computers) for research into very large document data base navigation strategies. That is something that the purveyors of MPP need to sell their products beyond  very limited number of space and intelligence agencies. They should like nothing better than to bring mainstream organizations into the MPP market.  Think of it.  In 1994, The Thinking Machines Inc.'s (TMI) Connection Machine (and this is their mid-level computer, not the top of their line) had 68,000 parallel processors.  (At the same time, the biggest IBM mainframe -- the Sierra model -- had 5 multi-processors.)  That means that one could be examining as many documents in the same pico-second of time.  Up until very recently, MPP was reserved for space satellite information, e.g., weather data, and industrial strength scientific applications.  The first business use was for implementation of the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) system when Brewster Kahle was still at TMI. The multi-terabyte Data Vault was used with the Connection Machine for storing massive databases.  Because of the expense of those machines and the limited market for them, the two American supercomputer companies, Thinking Machines and Cray, have since disappeared with the latest buy-out of Cray by Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), the maker of very high-end workstations that have been used for the special effects productions by such companies as Industrial Light and Magic in the making of such movies as Jurassic Park, Forest Gump and Twister.  The U.S. MPP market is now owned by SGI. They should be approached for possible partnering in developing very large-scale multimedia document storage systems and related navigational tools.  It would help in all of these private sector initiatives if we were to have engaged more business archivists in ERM issues in recent years.  It is not too late to do that.

There are some people at NIST already working in this area I believe or close enough to possibly be willing to partner the funding of ERM projects that support their own research agendas -- e.g., the full-text lab and the speech recognition lab. Maybe it seems too simple, but NHPRC might use some of its money to influence the agenda of Government labs specializing in areas that have a strong potential for tackling ERM issues.

Electronic Filing Schemes
          
Some people are thinking of using existing legacy paper schemes for of electronic records. My own experience in using personal e-file systems since 1984 is that electronic schemes are usually much more robust than paper filing schemes.  This would suggest that limiting e-file schemes to what we have with paper would not be taking the greatest advantage of computer technology. Moreover, there is some thinking in the ARM field that it may be feasible to eliminate filing schemes for electronic records altogether in favor of full-text search and thesaurus schemes.  This is a potential high-return research area. 

Linking Files in Different Storage and Presentation Media

Coupled with the previous item is the need to address the linking of paper, microform, and multimedia records -- especially paper and digital records.  Very few information technology development vendors are interested in paper.  That is not where they make their money.  There are a few exceptions among some of the smaller producers of electronic document management systems such as Tower Software and Provenance. One large producer is Xerox which claims that it is the one company that intends to provide continuing links between paper and digital forms. .  (So far as I know, Xerox is the only technology company that sells paper.)  Moreover, they now call themselves “The Document Company”.  When I served on the Xerox Executive Advisory Forum a few years ago, I advised them that if they truly plan to become the document company, then they should be aware that recordkeeping is the single largest application market that fits that statement.  Like most vendors, however, they need to hear this message from the marketplace before heavily investing in it.
          
Linking paper and electronic files is also an enormous problem in developing countries where, in many cases, paper systems have totally collapsed.  This problem is, or should be, of considerable interest to the U. S. Government in its development assistance aims and its efforts to promote government by law, democratization, accountability, administrative reform and to minimize corruption.  The London-based International Records Management Trust (IRMT) is proposing the establishment of an ERMR&D Centre to tackle these and related projects.  Efforts should be made to determine how the USG might leverage such an organization by partnering with IRMT.  This might not be possible through NHPRC because of legal constraints prohibiting the use of grants in foreign countries; however, partnering grants might be organized through bi-lateral and multi-lateral official aid organizations such as USAID, the World Bank and the regional development banks.  Other countries and academe could similarly support such an international ERMR&D center.

Legal Admissibility of Electronic Records
          
In a less researchy and more operational mode, programs could be stimulated to cover legal admissibility areas of wide interest to the ARM community. E.g., I was asked a couple of years ago to review a grant request for the NHPRC on the use of ERM in the courts.  I got very excited about the prospects of the proposal until I learned that it was about court administration.  Court administration is important; but I was hoping to see some work done to ferret out specific cases in which electronic records have been introduced in the courts (such as the Managing Counsel for the USAA insurance company says it has done in several cases) and what the results have been.  In the international arena, it would be helpful to carry out an inventory of ARM-related laws and practices.

Open Systems Standards
          
Presently no one is supporting research into the use of open systems standards for ERM. What we did in the 1987-89 ACCIS project has been very helpful in creating awareness of the links between standards and ERM.  But is anyone funding work to get DFR changed to more adequately reflect the needs of ARM?  No one from NARA or elsewhere in the ARM community even attends NIST Open-Systems Implementers Workshop (OIW) meeting even if only to monitor what is going on seriously in the area of multimedia and hypermedia document standards. Such standards as Document Filing & Retrieval (OSI 10166) and X.500 (Directory Services) are excellent candidates for introducing archival description and other ARM functionality.
          
But what is happening in the US is a tragedy in this respect. The leader of the multimedia group, Jon Stewart can find no one in the US interested enough to support the DFR work.  This is the country doing the most in terms of producing electronic document management systems (EDMS), and the least in terms of developing such standards as DFR.  None of a dozen vendors I have spoken to in recent years had ever heard of DFR.  A few European vendors on the other hand have shown some interest in this and related standards.

Human Factors in Recordkeeping
          
The ARM community depends almost solely on the creators of records to make recordkeeping work -- much of the meta data and in some cases even the decision as to whether a particular document will be treated as a record or not.  Yet much of what the ARM community wants from document creators results in unfriendly, not friendly, interfaces.  So far as I am aware, there is virtually no research going on in the area of the human factors of electronic recordkeeping.  We could really use some research into how people react to using electronic records and how we can make it easier for them to do so.  The most obvious -- certainly not the only -- area here would be research into the ERM user interface.  In other words, what are the human functional requirements for a system to make it friendly enough for people to use it, especially with regard to the graphical user interface (GUI).  Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant at the Human Computer Interface Lab at the U. of MD are doing the closest thing to that that I have seen.  Though not specifically addressing the ARM application area, they have done some very interesting World Bank funded work on a different kind of GUI that, instead of being "utility" oriented (word processor, spreadsheet, DB management tool, etc.) has icons for major business process or task areas. The jump from there to ERM is not a large one.  They have a videotape on this, along with some other HCI research.
          
ERM Research & Development Technology Watch
          
Is there anyone who is monitoring and consolidating the results of all this research on ERM wherever it is taking place -- NHPRC or elsewhere -- and getting that word out?  It could be something for the ERECS-L or possibly a dedicated List, or better still a WWW page with linkages to all known research projects whether funded by NHPRC or not, that would be restricted to research  subjects and that we would try to attract researchers outside of the ARM community to participate in and contribute to, e.g., AI researchers, EDMS researchers, e.g. at XEROX PARC Labs, and others internationally such as the Swiss Federal Archives project.

Distributed Archives

Even among national governments that are deeply involved in ERM there is not consensus over the subject of distributed vs. centralized national (or state) electronic archives.  This fact suggests that there is a need for better understanding of these different approaches.

Using Intranets & X.500 Directory Services for Delivering Electronic Records Services

The development of “intranets” or internal Internets that use WWW technology to create a “behind-the-fire-wall” system for the delivery of multimedia documents is a growing phenomenon. Intranets differ from more common uses of WWW technology for publicly accessible websites in that the later have generally been used to inform others of products and services.  Intranets, however, are being used very differently to carry out the internal business of the organization.  In a recent survey of large U.S. private sector firms, about half already had or were planning their own intranets.  In some cases it is an internal Internet limited to a single organization.  In others access may be extended beyond the parent organization to include its suppliers.  If the history of other document management systems is any indicator, it would be safe to assume that there is little recordkeeping functionality built into these systems.  Yet, Web technology is based on the HTML standard, a daughter of SGML.  It is technology independent and thus offers a potentially excellent platform for the delivery of electronic records services.  Particularly when coupled with X.500 standard directory services, a very fruitful area for research, in my opinion, would be to examine present systems and design future systems. 

Elevating ERM to the Political Levels of Government

The U.S. Archivist is uniquely positioned to approach Vice President Gore with concerns over the growing use of electronic forms of communication in the workplace and its rising impact on productivity, its potential for savings in paper storage and paperwork, and its recordkeeping implications, including as part of plans for the development of the National Information Infrastructure.  This would afford an opportunity to ensure that at least a minimal level of recordkeeping functionality is built into the NII.  Now is the time to make that intervention before those plans are much further advanced.

[This article was published in THE RECORD, U. S. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C., September 1996. It is also available on the WWW at URL <http://www.rbarry.com/> under the Recent Papers and Engagements section.]

Catching the Multimedia Intranet Train Before it Leaves the Station

by Richard E. Barry

Organizational change is often accompanied with the introduction of new technologies that seem to appear threateningly on the horizon even before we have gotten our arms around the last one. It used to be that major changes came in periodic cycles with time in between to acknowledge, digest, accept, adapt and master to the best of our abilities.  Now, and we are warned for the foreseeable future, change will be an inherent feature of modern organizations. Organizations will have to sense, learn and adapt to movements in the social and economic ecosystems in which they operate in ways that earlier we attributed only to humans and other biological forms.  It is easy to understand why some archives and records management (ARM) professionals throw up their hands and hope that it will all somehow work itself out before anything really bad happens.  

Save it to Paper

One archivist recently told me that the best strategy for dealing with electronic records was to simply print them to paper and treat them in the old fashioned way.  We understand paper. We know what to do with it. It’s a more stable medium. Etc. I agreed that this was a common and wise stop-gap approach that many archivists and records managers are finding necessary to employ until such time as they can deal more directly with electronic records in their native forms.  I suggested, however, that managers would not much longer defer substantial reductions in paper and paperwork and that it was therefore, at best, a holding strategy to buy some time to get effective, ARM-proof, electronic recordkeeping systems in place. 

Multimedia

Moreover, I suggested that in the not distant future, we would see the real emergence of multimedia documents with voice annotation, embedded sound and video objects. I believe that most archivists see it that way, but obviously some do not.  However, the reply in this case was:  “We simply won’t allow people to use multimedia for recordkeeping purposes.”

In my opinion, discussed further in my paper “The Changing Workplace and the Nature of the Record” at <http:www.rbarry.com>, innovations in information management and technology (IM&T) have not changed the nature of the record, but they have changed the manner in which records must be managed.  The increasing use of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) have given people a glance at how effective multimedia documents (including records) can be in conveying business messages and attracting new clients. Virtually all new desk-top computers are multimedia equipped for sound, CD-ROM and in many cases Web browser and video capture software. This fact, coupled with the relative ease and low costs associated with access to the WWW, augurs to hasten the day when multimedia will become standard fare in business communication in both the private and public sector.  It does not need to be emphasized that multimedia records cannot be printed out.

Intranets

As part of the changing picture in the workplace, a related technology is rapidly coming to the forefront -- the intranet.  Intranets will hasten the day of the multimedia record.  More importantly the intranet may also be one of the most promising technologies to date that has the potential to become the much waited for enabler of electronic recordkeeping rather than one more “problem technology” to try to stop in its tracks.  

What are “intranets” and how do they differ from previous workplace technologies?  Intranets are the logical extension of Internet and World Wide Web technologies into systems that are designed for use within an organization rather than between an organization and the public at large.  Think of the Web site that is now common on the WWW, only now restricted to internal use within an organization.  One might ask the “So-what?” question.  Having seen the term in the IM&T journal literature and heard about the growing interest in intranets from IT colleagues, I requested a bibliographic search at my neighborhood expresso bookstore in May for a listing of all books with the term “intranet” in the title.  The result was illuminating.  There were 13 titles.  The earliest among them was dated March 1996.  Five of the 13 titles at that time had publication dates for sometime after May.   In one of them (see below), the author refers to the results of a Business Research Group survey that was reported in the November 7, 1995  Wall Street Journal on the subject.  It indicated that about 25% of the 170 large and medium-sized firms that were surveyed already had intranets in place at the time of the survey and an additional 20% were actively considering such a system.
 
Intranets are similar to the Internet and World Wide Web in that they use like standards and technologies. It isn’t important to the thrust of this article to explain them here.  For the purposes of this discussion, it is enough to note that they include the open system standard Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, Web browsers, servers and related software and Internet protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Intranets may use architectures that are logically or physically centralized or decentralized depending on the need. HTML is a daughter of the long-established and internationally recognized Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML or ISO Standard 8879).  Structure is an important characteristic of records that is apparent in traditional paper documents.  One of the important features needed in electronic records is that they have or can be given that needed structure.  SGML and now HTML help do this and thus are standards of considerable interest to the ARM community.

The Internet and intranets also differ in some very important ways.  First, most WWW sites on the Internet are open to anyone in the world who has access to the Internet and a Web browser. The public is the customer.  By contrast, intranets exist behind organizational, password-controlled telecommunications/computer security “firewalls”. Its customers are the internal operating units and staff. The definition of “internal” is up to the implementing organization.  Access can be selectively extended outside of the immediate organization to global field offices and designated suppliers or customers, thus protecting the security of the system from the general public while providing access to the “extended family” directly involved in the business of the intranet organization.  This technology is ideal for supporting emerging workplace patterns involving outsourced services.  Intranets facilitate their incorporation back into the original parent organization’s “internal” business-related information and transaction systems.

Secondly, the content and applications of intranet systems are normally vastly different from those of the typical WWW site or homepage. The content of Internet WWW sites is normally information about the owner organization or individual -- usually concerning public or private sector services or products (including information) that the homepage owner wants the public to use.  Thus they are usually of primary interest to public relations or sales managers.  By contrast, the intranet is typically used as a vehicle for conducting the core internal business and support processes of an organization, e.g.:
•	human resources business processes (hiring, training, pensioning, etc.)
•	internal “help desk” or “customer service” operations, 
•	gaining access to and searching internal document stores and legacy databases in different technological environments, whether through off-the-shelf or customized database packages, using forms created in HTML instead of the vendor-supplied interface
•	manuals and forms management including dynamic “fill-out-the-form” applications such as time sheets and vacation requests
•	ordering reports, parts, supplies, etc.  
•	groupware applications such as group authoring and project management tasks 

As such, intranets are of greater interest to senior executives and operational managers. (For a comprehensive discussion of the subject, see Building Intranets, by Tim Evans, Sams.net Publishing, 1996, ISBN 1-57521-071-1, from which a number of the above examples were taken).

WWW Internet applications and intranet systems are in no way mutually exclusive.  On the contrary, most organizations implementing intranets will probably also have WWW sites or homepages where they can have a public image and presence.  They will serve very different but complementary purposes.  Similarly, intranets and groupware (e.g., LOTUS NOTES) are not presently mutually exclusive.  Today, most intranets are more in the nature of networking utilities than groupware.  However, as groupware developers race to give their products Web functionality and intranet technology matures to include groupware functionality, the differences between the two will become less distinct -- except that intranet technology, in contrast to most groupware products, uses open systems architectures rather than proprietary ones and typically costs much less than most groupware products.  Intranets will become quintessential groupware.

Intranet Recordkeeping Systems

What is most interesting about this emerging technology to ARM practitioners is its potential for the delivery of textual and multimedia records and recordkeeping services to the clients of the ARM function. Moreover, if transactions and other organizational business are taking place over them, then intranets will be record-producing systems whether they are so intended or not.  As ARM professionals have learned the hard way, the fact that a system produces records does not guarantee that it is a trustworthy recordkeeping system.  Without incorporation of recordkeeping functionality into its design -- the typical starting condition -- it is not. The ARM function should, of course, deal with the recordkeeping aspects of the underlying individual systems independently of the intranet.  But this will often be very costly to undertake, e.g., in legacy mainframe applications. The intranet offers an enormously beneficial opportunity to also become a recordkeeping system that, alas, is technology independent, deals with multiple systems, is capable of handling multimedia documents (or composite content objects as they are sometimes referred to) and is trustworthy.  In theory, this technology should offer a great opportunity for ARM practitioners to address some of the most intractable issues associated with electronic records management -- dealing with widely divergent technologies including multimedia records over long periods of time.  In short, intranets offer an excellent platform to deliver records management stores, services and backroom functions within the organization and its extended family.

Is it a panacea or ready made solution?  No.  However, working out the recordkeeping functionality of an intranet that is already planned for other reasons would make an excellent candidate for anyone interested in electronic records management R&D. With or without the benefit of such applied research, ARM professionals are going to have to step onto the platform again (or hire their own IT guns) to ensure the appropriate incorporation of recordkeeping functionality in intranet systems.  Archivists and records managers should approach their chief information officer or equivalent and find out if plans for implementation of an intranet are already underway.  If not, the ARM managers may be in the unusual position of advancing a state-of-the-art technology to their IM&T colleagues, along with their own skills and commitments for also making it a trustworthy recordkeeping system.  If such plans are underway, ARM practitioners will surely want to catch that train before it leaves the station.