Practical guidance on how to manage an organization’s records and information, to minimize risk and maximize value on the bottom line. Buried in paper and feeling helpless? Not sure what to keep, what to toss? Consultant and former corporate records manager Karen Sampson understands the problem and gives you safe, useful, proven solutions. Unlike most books that limit their scope to the tactics of records management, Sampson’s revised and expanded edition of her earlier classic shows how records and information management practices–in tandem–contribute directly to an organization’s financial well being. They add value to your organization, public or private, nonprofit or profitmaking. Sampson delineates the risks of having no program at all or just a bad one. She shows how recordkeeping practices affect business objectives, processes, functions, and ultimately everyone in the organization. Recordkeeping in all media–including paper, microfilm, electronic, and other storage modes–all are covered here. To which Sampson adds a cautionary section: why skillful records and information management is essential to safeguard an organization’s legal rights. Hands-on, readable, aimed not only at records managers themselves but everyone in the organization with decision making responsibilities, Sampson’s new edition is an essential resource to keep any business library up to date and useful. As new technologies, threats of litigation, and the onslaught of e-business innovations change the very nature of work itself, Sampson gives you ways to recognize and adopt whole new perspectives on how to manage your organization’s trove of information, safely and properly. She points out that despite the widespread acceptance of new business technologies, we continue to manage electronic records in ways separate from the way we handle paper and microfilm. We usually ignore the proper application of records and information management principles to the new methods created by electronic systems. Sampson’s book calls for dramatic change. Instead of focusing on records media and information technologies, she says we must focus on the content and value of records, as they are determined by an organization’s operating needs and by the government requirements and legislation that affect them. She shows how to do this, how to create an essential uniformity in records management, one that integrates all of the many media systems you are using today into one master system. Her book provides fresh management perspectives and new business strategies, and shows how to cope with the growing dependence on electronic records of all kinds.
