Roots: 1992

It was late in 1991 that Susan Montgomery first suggested to Aslib that  it should form a special interest network focused specifically on the management of information resources.  Aslib contacted those members who had attended Woody Horton's series of InfoMapping  seminars in the two or three preceding years, and an open forum was held at Aslib on 5 March 1992 to discuss the prospects for such an initiative.

At that inaugural meeting, an eight-person Steering Group was elected, and the group's objectives - subsequently refined but not substantially altered - were discussed at length and agreed as being to:

• offer a sharing experience
• put an Anglicised emphasis on IRM
• learn about software solutions
• develop guidelines to measure cost/value of IRM
• develop guidelines for the production of an IRM policy document
• provide case studies of good practice and value measurements, particularly in the UK
• spread the word on IRM and thus eliminate the sense of working in a vacuum

When the Steering Group first met on 18 March 1992, the members' unbounded enthusiasm was initially offset by the realisation that IRM's ambit seemed impossibly broad and its boundaries ill-defined.  These issues were resolved brilliantly when Nick Willard shared with us a generic resource management model which he had adapted to relate to information. 

Stem: 1992 - 1997

The Willard Model, as it has come to be known, provided an enduring framework for the network's activities, and it was agreed to spend a year focused on each of its five levels.  From 1992 to 1997 therefore, the IRM Network explored each level by inviting appropriate speakers to share their visions and experiences and to stimulate discussion.

Branch: 1998 -

At its AGM on 14 July 1998, the IRM Network opted to explore the new topic of Knowledge Management (KM), assisted once again by an introductory seminar  presented by Nick Willard.  Could this have been where we were headed all along?  Is KM different from IRM?  Were we more pioneering than we realised? 

Maybe.  Maybe not, as perhaps revealed by the following quote from the minutes of that very first meeting on 5 March 1992:

"There were several suggestions that IRM should perhaps not be IRM at all but be called 'Information Asset Management', 'Knowledge Asset Management', or even 'Knowledge Capital'."

How the wheel turns!

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  27-Oct-2002