Records Management, An Introduction (ASS 2)

Explain on how records affect our human life.

The rights and entitlements of citizens are based on records, and the ability of a government to continue to respect these rights and entitlements is based on the  quality of the policies, standards, and practices employed for the care of those records. In an increasingly electronic environment, where information is held in a fragile format, this is much more difficult to achieve than is usually realized.

What would happen to any human if their records gone missing?

As long as services are being delivered and nothing is going obviously wrong, the public are content to ignore such internal matters. Even when these files contain something out of the ordinary, such as allegations of child sexual abuse by powerful people, many people have explained the lost or missing records as not something out of the ordinary. Records get lost on a regular basis or they get destroyed as part of the normal records management process. In local government, if the documents are not part of the official decision process, then there is no reason to keep them or provide them to the local Records Office.

How far the impact would be for any human or even the country to have the records of any human to go missing?

The records management policy provides the framework within which a governmental body affirms its commitment to create authentic and reliable records. The purpose of these guidelines is to enable records managers to compile their own records management policy using the guidelines as a basis to work from. Governmental bodies should also take note of the recommendations regarding matters that should be addressed in a records management.

How far does information growth contribute to information explosion? If information explosion occurs, will it cause any disturbance towards the operation of organizations or country or even the world ?

Data holders operating autonomously and with limited knowledge are left with the difficulty of releasing information that does not compromise privacy, confidentiality or national interests. In many cases the survival of the database itself depends on the data holder's ability to produce anonymous data because not releasing such information at all may obstruct the goals for which the data were collected, while on the other hand, failing to provide proper protection within a release may create circumstances that harm the public or others.

Growth in supermarket transaction data

Private sector information about individuals has expanded also. For example, supermarket transactions consisted only of summary price information in 1983 and were not identified to individuals. In many supermarkets today in Illinois, the complete list of purchased items is often stored along with the identity of the consumer. This increase in the volume of data collected about individuals from supermarket purchases is the topic of discussion in this subsection.

Supermarket loyalty cards

As Catalina Marketing began its data collection, awareness arose among retailers that with the help of personally identifying cards and state-of-the-art database technology, retailers, such as supermarkets, could analyze millions of transactions quickly to identify their best customers and build loyalty through special rewards such as discounted prices. These are called loyalty programs and the accompanying card is termed a loyalty card.

National Directory of New Hires

In a report prepared for the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Federal Services in 1994, non payment of child support was shown to contribute to childhood poverty as well as to increases in the number of families receiving welfare [13]. This report stated that in 1994, more than one-fifth of America’s children lived in poverty, and it recited an estimate that half of those would live in single parent families at some point in their lives. To help obtain the financial support that parents owe their children and to reduce welfare costs, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

Summary

In summary, there is no doubt that society is moving towards an environment in which society could have almost all the data on all the people. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to produce anonymous and declassified information in today's globally networked society. Most data holders do not even realize the jeopardy at which they place financial, medical, or national security information when they erroneously rely on security practices of the past. Technology has eroded previous protections leaving the information vulnerable. In the past, a person seeking to reconstruct private information was limited to visiting disparate file rooms and engaging in labor-intensive review of printed material in geographically distributed locations.