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Posts tagged 'information architecture'

6
Wed Mar
2013
1

The bones of the matter: Keeping it together, when it isn’t

Posted by Julie Zielstra in Managing information
Illustration of magic trick showing skeleton with disguised assistant to make it seem disarticulated

The disarticulated skeleton shared by plaisanter on Flickr. CC by-SA 2.0

How can records managers support access and provide context in an age where people and systems create and store masses of information that may be related, across many locations? It doesn’t have to be a magic act, but there are some ways to help make it hang together and support the lifecycle management of organisational information.

Records managers have the opportunity to lead and become the experts within their organisations in the use and application of the technologies that can trawl the many places, including the web and social media, to find information, provide context and make it appear together either for the end user or for automated actions – sometimes referred to as ‘actionable analytics’.

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4
Fri Jan
2013
2

Getting your five a day – it takes a lot of information to make a garden grow

Posted by Julie Zielstra in Managing information

Information isn’t like apples and oranges, or even vegetables, but after my first year gardening on an allotment I realised how much information management I used to grow a simple salad.

Dig for plenty, by Le Bon

Dig for plenty, by Le Bon (catalogue reference INF 3/98)

Those uniform bags of leaves sitting in the supermarket cooler had me lulled into a false sense of the ease and simplicity of the mechanics of planning, growing, protecting, distributing and finally storing the crop until it was time to eat.

If you haven’t gardened on an allotment before, it’s a community spirit geared towards the frugal application of resources, sharing and recycling, to create an abundance of crops. We’re seeing this attitude in the management of information as well – less is more, collaboration is necessary. When I started writing this blog post, I wanted to explain how an allotment is like a community cloud – I could use my own garden, but I choose to share a place that I pay for and can walk away from – hopefully with plenty of delicious food! But the Cloud is hogging the show lately – information management is needed whether it’s a cloud or your own servers and infrastructure.

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