Education for Electronic Data Management

The ANU asked me to run a course in Electronic Data Management (COMP7420). This is 3 units (half the length of a normal ANU semester long course) and is the equivalent of 60 hours work for the student (10 hours a week for six weeks). In finalising the content of the course I thought I should look at what guidelines, standards and other courses there are. The first difficulty with this is the narrow specialisation of the course.

The nearest similar course I could find was "Electronic Records and Document Management" ( LIBR 5009 012621) at UniSA School of Communication. AIIM have aElectronic Records Management (ERM) Certificate Program of four days duration (or online equivalent).

The Records Management Association of Australasia have an extensive list of Educational and training courses for records management. However, these are mostly for records management in general, not electronic records in particular. Listed for Monash University, Faculty of Information Technology, School of Information Management and Systems is their Graduate Certificate, Diploma and Masters of Information Management and Systems (Electronic Recordkeeping and Archiving Stream).

RMAA refers to "Records and Archives Competency Standards" available from Innovation and Business Skills Australia, but I was unable to find any mention of such standards on the IBSA web site.

National Archives of Australia have a web page detailing Qualifications for records staff. Knowledge, skills and experience are defined with reference to Australian Standard for Records Management AS ISO 15489 – 2002.There are two parts to this standard (General and Guidelines). NAA refer to the university courses listed by RMAA and also Australian Society of Archivists Inc (ASA). The Business Services Training Package (BSB01) of IBSA is referred to but with a non-functional web link.

NAA also provide the materials for a free short course "What you need to know about managing records when working for the Australian Government". This includes Powerpoint slides (pdf, 470kb), presenter's guide (pdf, 2.6mb) and a 20 minute self paced e-Learning module. The e-learning module is avialable in a tex/print version optimised for accessibility, as well as the HTML (low-bandwidth) and Flash (media-rich) versions. Unfortunately this is not a complete e-learning module as it lacks any form of assessment for the student to assess what they have learnt. However, it could be a very useful start for a course.