Harold Thiele was first introduced to electronic records issues in 1988 when he began working as the Air Land Battle Management (ALBM) project Technical Librarian with Lockheed, Austin Division. The focus was on records security and collection indexing for transfer to the corporate archives. In 1990, he went to work for Texaco Chemical Company as a Research Librarian. While at Texaco the electronic records issues he dealt with involved policy development, finding aids, and system backups. Thus sensitized, he joined the Vermont State Archives in 1994 as an Electronic Records Archivist working under an NHPRC grant. Working in Vermont allowed him to become familiar with the entire range of electronic records issues and work on different approaches in the attempt to establish a state-wide electronic records system. During this period he identified standards, participated in policy and law making activities, tested engineering process modeling techniques, and developed a series of technical bulletins related to electronic records issues. At the end of the grant, he accepted a Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, and is now pursuing a Ph. D. with a concentration in electronic records. During 1995 and 1996, he wrote four technical bulletins on electronic records issues for the Vermont State Archives, and presented two papers at NAGARA 96, one dealing with a macrofunctional approach (based on business process models) to records appraisal, and the second dealing with decision levels in organizations and how this affects presentation of electronic recordkeeping issues. He also participated in several working meetings on electronic records held at Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor in 1996. His current focus is on identifying warrants that support electronic recordkeeping issues (focused on Internal Revenue Sservice regulations and ISO 9000 & 14000 requirements), organizational memory as a focus for electronic recordkeeping (especially how to capture provenance and "informal memory"), and organizational culture.
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16 June 1997