Media Vexation: How Did We Get Here?

By Gordon E.J. Hoke

How did we get here? Despite the staunch efforts of AIIM, ARMA, and myriad practitioners, the Records & Information Management (RIM) world still wrestles with the progression of paper records to electronic records, not to mention the integration of the two media. Paper or plastic? Isolated or federated? Local or remote? The choices are endless. To successfully address these issues, it helps to know the back-story. How did we get here from there?

Until the mid-1980s, almost all business records were physical, that is, the medium that held the information was made up of atoms. Most of that was paper, which, by today's standard, is an inefficient form for storage. The rest was mostly microform—pretty much the same idea, but denser. Paper had advantages. After all, if one is near a window on a sunny day, no further power source is required. And file systems were straightforward. It’s not surprising that records management borrowed heavily from Library Science. To this day, most academic degrees in records management are conferred by schools of Library Science.

Toward the end of the 1980s, five necessary advances in hardware (and the software to control them) laid the grounds for the sea change we see today.
1. Digital scanning. Paper-image copiers of the 1960s-1980s used xerography, a photographic process. This contrasts with digital scanning, where each small patch, of a sheet of paper, that is, a bit of information, is identified as either black or white. The sequence of identities passed through a wire for either storage or remote reconstruction as a bit-mapped image. The first mass application of digital scanning was for facsimile (fax) machines.
2. Dense, low-cost digital storage. On the heels of the fax boom came optical disk storage. This used the newly popularized and finally affordable laser to burn disks with the sequence of white/black bits coming from the scanner. When the technology increased its capacity and lowered its costs, digital storage of images became practical. Users, effectively, faxed images to themselves and stored them for later use.
3. Computer speed. The bits of information that a scanner produces need control and direction, meaning they had to pass through a computer. In the mid-80s, personal computers had limited processing power, and mainframe processing was expensive. As the decade waned, however, prices for personal computers with Intel’s 80286 microprocessor lowered, and for the first time, the processing power to handle images was widely deployed.
4. Image Displays. Before the mid-80s, computer monitors generally showed only plain, alphanumeric characters. Any variations were indicated by markup language. The second half of the decade witnessed the release of increasingly sophisticated monitors that could display bit-mapped images as well as characters.
5. Laser printers. Early printers used wires to print dots in a matrix, with a resolution too low for most graphical applications. Character printers of the time essentially automated the capabilities of a typewriter. By contrast, in a laser printer, the image is actually directed by a digital sequence such as that which makes up a digital image. The first, mass-produced laser printer arrived in 1984, so it was ready when the other components came together.

These five technologies made possible electronic records, the boon and bane of today’s records managers.

Patrick Cunningham, esteemed purveyor and blogger of “Above the RIM,” suggests two software advances that led to the current state of Records & Information Management.

One is the productivity suite that brought word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and more to many office workers. This spread or democratized the ability and responsibility for records creation. “Where you once had a secretary or a word processing pool that would create documents (and file copies), you now had the anarchy of the user,” Cunningham writes.

Secondly, he cites email and the Internet as a sea change in managing records. The proliferation of distribution created radical new challenges to the traditional discipline of RIM. “Velocity and productivity radically changed,” Cunningham opines.

There is no single solution to electronic records or media choices, but knowing context helps RIMers and ECMers craft their strategies to address current challenges. “Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them.” Let’s remember from whence we came.

Gordy Hoke, Certified Records Manager, is an independent consultant focusing on the necessary balance between RIM and ECM. He can be reached at ghoke@mindspring.com and (507) 254-6474. Read his blog: http://PositivelyRIM.blogspot.com.