MER 2010: Sessions Details

Increasingly organizations are entering the brave new world of Web 2.0. Using more tools more frequently – from Facebook fan pages, to Twitter, to enterprise social networking – organizations are creating ever-increasing amounts of information.

For many organizations, the use of these tools is significantly ahead of their ability to manage them effectively. Records managers, for the most part, have not yet provided guidance on managing Web 2.0 generated information within the organization’s records program.

While Web 2.0 tools are new, the records management principles that manage records according to their content and context are the same. Thus, while some of the outputs from these Web 2.0 tools will rise to the level of “records” and need to be managed accordingly; others will not and need not.

The objective of this session is to provide participants with an introduction to Web 2.0 tools and processes. Participants will learn to:

• Describe the different classes of Web 2.0 tools and their representative capabilities
• Identify and describe the differences between commercial sites such as Facebook and enterprise social solutions
• Describe common use cases for these tools, both public and internal Describe some of the legal and operational challenges these tools present to organizations
• Prepare a decision tree to determine whether the particular output of a given tool is a record or not
• Describe steps to declare and manage records generated through these tools

In this session, you will learn a) why records managers must gain an understanding of how Web 2.0 tools fit into their organization, b) what types of Web 2.0 information should be treated as “records”, and c) how to address the challenge of managing Web 2.0 generated records.