February 1, 2006
Dear Everyone:
In the past, I’ve mentioned the Institute of Certified Records Managers (ICRM), a group of records managers who have devised a six-part examination for other records managers. If you successfully pass the examination, you are allowed to call yourself a Certified Records Manager (CRM).
Last year, when the Information Management (IM) function was moved from “Boring & Really Expensive Services (BRES) to the Information Technology Company (ITC), management decided that it would be a good idea for as many of us as qualify to take the examination and become CRM’s. To that end, a group of us formed a CRM Study Group. We meet every other Tuesday, on our lunch break.
We have a textbook that we’ve been reading, generally two chapters to be completed by the next meeting. However, because the group’s leader had another commitment this week, she moved the meeting to Thursday (tomorrow) instead. This turned out to be a bit of a lifesaver for me. (Records management to the rescue, once again.)
“Jeannie” went up to visit Mother (and “Frankie”) last weekend, so I figured I’d get those two chapters done easily with no one to “distract” me. But, of course, I didn’t. All weekend long, I kept thinking, “I’ll just get this one thing taken care of, and then I’ll sit down and read my textbook.” And, naturally, one thing led to another, and so on… And by Sunday evening, I was thinking, “That’s OK. I can read the two chapters Monday evening. There’s nothing on TV until 10:00 anyway.”
Then I remembered that I had volunteered to meet “Jeannie” at the airport after work on Monday. So then, I was thinking, “Oh, @^*%! I may be able to read a bit while waiting for “Jeannie” to show up, but I’m never going to get through two chapters at the airport. I’m done for.”
But then I looked at my calendar and remembered
that, this week only, the meeting wasn’t until Thursday (tomorrow).
So last night, while the
Shrub from the
White House was giving his “State
of the
Technically, I still haven’t read either chapter. But I do have answers to most of the questions. In fact, I sometimes find that it works better this way. You hunt through the chapter until you find the answer. Later, when you actually read the chapter, you come across a piece and go, “Oh, yeah! That’s how all this fits together.”
Chapters 11 and 12, by the way, deal with optical imaging (versus microfilming) and optical imaging systems. Ten years ago, when this book was being published, optical imaging, and optical disks in particular, were all the rage in the records management world. Optical disks were especially hot because you could store thousands of pages on a single disk. Multiple disks could be housed in a disk driver, or a jukebox.
These things are dinosaurs now. Nobody stores images on optical disk anymore, much less has a special drive for viewing the images. And people quickly found the downside of jukeboxes, which is that they break down and jam the disks. These days, images are stored on a server because memory is so much cheaper than it was ten years ago.
They also go on and on in the book about the types of scanners and how expensive they were at the time. Today, people think nothing of scanning a document on the nearest network printer and emailing the image to themselves. As for cost, the little printer sitting on the shelf under this computer is a scanner and a copier (in addition to printing) and it cost me $80.
Nevertheless, we have to know all this stuff, just as we have to know all about microfilming and aperture cards and other antiquated records management stuff. Because it may be on the exam. I’ve heard that the exam can include some pretty old-fashioned questions. Does that mean that the ICRM is run by a bunch of dinosaurs?
Anyway, I don’t have to get my application in until the first of July. That’s to take the exam in November. So there’s still time to read all the chapters.
Love, as always,
Pete
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