From Transaction to Interaction: Socio-materiality, Reliability and Transparency in an Age of "Unbound Documents"

• Main Author: Christopher Colwell
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Akron Press 2015-12-01
• Series: Proceedings from the Document Academy
• Subjects: government recordkeeping; records; social media; case study
• Online Access: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol2/iss1/18

Social media applications, such as Facebook, have been described as “documents without borders”. (Skare & Lund, 2014). In an Australian Government context these documents (which may also be records) exist outside the boundaries of the organisation to which they relate, and which created them. Unlike other documents in an organisational setting, they are “unbound” from the usual organisational processes of creation, management and control but still subject to relevant legislative and recordkeeping obligations (Hesling, 2014). This paper explores initial themes from the first case study of a larger doctoral study into the perceptions of records in Australian Government agencies. Among these themes are that organisational processes and the socio-material nature of social media may affect how users construct their concepts around records and the transparency and the reliability of records in an age of “unbounded documents”.