Content area
Full Text
Introduction
This paper addresses problems related to collaborative recordkeeping in the context of a client-contractor relationship between a public agency and their contractors, a context where principles and practices, as well as legal conditions, remain unclear, despite decades of development strongly influenced by new public management. Recordkeeping requires ongoing attention and continuous revisions are needed, for example when new technology and ways of organizing the business are introduced. A topic of high relevance today is the practical and theoretical implications of digital work processes, which have been discussed at length among scholars in the archival and recordkeeping domains. Research projects such as InterPARES (), AC + Erm (McLeod et al. , 2010), the Clever Recordkeeping Metadata Project () and E-Ark () have focused on identifying and tackling the challenges of managing and preserving digital records. The present paper turns the focus toward changes that are occurring parallel to the development of digital work processes, which are further increasing complexity, namely, changes in the way public agencies organize their business. The example put forward here is the use of outsourcing[1].
Public sector outsourcing [2] has been described as one of the major policies associated with new public management (Alonso et al. , 2015), a mechanism for government service provision which "[...] enables the government to retain control over the specification of the service, the management of the contract and the evaluation of the service provider's performance" (Jensen and Stonecash, 2005, p. 769). This can have the effect of consultants and contractors creating records that would previously have been created by the agency. This may become problematic because the public sector and the private sector are governed by different legal frameworks, and the established recordkeeping regimes tend to be based on a less complex form of organization.
This paper discusses how the four dimensions of the records continuum model (RCM) (Upward, 2005) can be used as a structure for identifying which important aspects of recordkeeping can be affected by an outsourcing policy, and the practical and theoretical consequences. An investment project at a Swedish public agency with a far-reaching outsourcing policy is used as a case to exemplify the problem.
Scope and objective
The theoretical framework developed within archival science can offer insights on how to tackle...