Conference Agenda (All times are shown in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) unless otherwise noted)

Records play an important role in supporting business activities and in ensuring accountability in all types of organisations. However, recordkeeping research has mostly focused on the government sector and on large organisations. Little attention has been paid to small organisations which have limited resources to create and manage the records that they are required to produce and the records that could support their engagement in diversified activities. In this paper, we report the findings from 16 focus group discussions with community-based organisations in Bangladesh which are in the process of transitioning from informal to registered organisations and, in order to do so, must formalise their recordkeeping practices. We discuss the recordkeeping needs and capabilities of these organisations and the recordkeeping problems that they are experiencing. We argue that it is important to support the development of a recordkeeping culture as part of capacity-building in these organisations so that they can function effectively and be sustainable.

This paper presents how Brazilian judiciary organizations are advancing towards a preserved digital environment, and how this process is improving the country’s legal system. First, it analyzed the legal norms published by some of the most relevant Brazilian institutions and how these norms fostered the major courts to immediately start projects related to digital preservation. Second, the major challenges faced by these organizations while fulfilling the legal requirements were listed, and a general strategy to attend to them was defined. Subsequently, a model was established to fulfill these requirements. The model was structured to consider the possibilities of future expansion. As the main result of this research, a model capable of setting archival digital preservation projects was designed for the first time, enabling their consequent application by judiciary institutions in Brazil.

This paper reports on an exploratory analysis of the social media policies of municipal governments in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. With a strong Public Records law and language clearly indicating that social media posts are government records, Massachusetts provides a framing for research into municipal policy on social media use, retention, preservation, and access. Of the 351 municipalities in the Commonwealth, just 87 have publicly accessible Social Media policies. These policies indicate that municipal governments take their responsibilities around social media records management seriously, they do not offer many specifics around how they will engage directly with posts from privately-owned social media platforms. Implications of these findings suggest that the digital preservation community must continue to develop tools and methods to preserve social media records the support broader efforts around government transparency and accountability, as well as advocate for platforms to include features to support responsible public sector social media use.

Archives serve as repositories for items of enduring value. Archivists use a process called appraisal to evaluate the value of these items. While various theories and methods have been developed to guide the appraisal and many issues have been identified, little is known about how archivists conduct appraisals or what efforts they undertake to mitigate these issues. As such, this exploratory and qualitative study aims to examine the appraisal practices of archivists in university special collections, the role of the collection policy, and how these policies deal with problematic aspects of appraisal. This study found that university special archivists view appraisal as a complex but systematic process and implement the collection policy’s principles and methodologies into their appraisal practices. Moreover, this study revealed that archivists try to establish and maintain effective relationships with donors and communities throughout the entire appraisal process.