Richard

Ideally an Archives department and a Records Management Department
should work closely together.

Records Management (RM) is mainly about managing the records needed for
carrying out the current operations of an organisation.  For legal and
other reasons from a Records Management perspective some of those
records will need to be kept indefinitely (e.g. births, marriages and
deaths, where the toxic waste is buried etc.)  Those records should at
some point be passed over to an "Archives" function.

Archives is about long term preservation and public access, and cultural
resource.

When the RM function reviews records for destruction the archives
function should be involved as records which no longer have a current
use may still be an important cultural resource. 

You might want the archives function to manage public access to all the
collections whether they fall within the RM or archives function in
order to provide one-stop seamless access for the public.

Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar, English Heritage, Room 530, 23 Savile Row, London
W1S 2ET, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7973 3482  Fax: +44 (0) 20 7973 3209

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