A little background reading…

About MoReq2010

MoReq2010 is the third edition of the MoReq specification after the original MoReq (2001) and the subsequent MoReq2 (2008). When it was first introduced MoReq was the only specification of its kind to have an international focus. Sponsored by the European Commission through its involvement in the DLM Forum, MoReq was intended to apply across different national jurisdictions.

“MoReq” originally stood for “Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records” and the specification was intended as just that: a model for how organisations in Europe interested in purchasing records systems might go about specifying the functionality they required. As such, the earlier versions of MoReq were always made available as Microsoft Word documents that could be used as a template for developing a unique set of requirements.

With the introduction of MoReq2, the DLM Forum also introduced a testing and certification programme alongside the functional specification, inspired by similar programmes in the US and UK. Once a testing regime was in place, however, it became more difficult for organisations to edit the specification and change it to suit themselves. Solutions that were certified against the original specification may or may not be capable of meeting the revised functionality required for a particular organisation.

Other issues also arose. The scope of MoReq2 was greatly expanded over its predecessor which led to a bigger and more complex specification that proved more costly for suppliers to implement. Greater cost of development meant that the number and range of systems that could adopt the specification became more selective.

The early MoReq specifications were also predicated around the idea that organisations would have a single centralised repository for all their records. Although this idea guided the industry throughout the first decade of the third millennium, by the end of that decade there was little or no evidence of organisations collectively moving to embrace it. After ten plus years of adoption, most organisations were still keeping their structured and unstructured records in a wide and expanding variety of different line of business systems, and not a centralised enterprise solution.

In 2010 the DLM Forum approved a new work programme to reshape the MoReq specification to try and achieve the following goals:

Greater flexibility – not all records systems would have to implement all the specified functionality
Greater extensibility – the specification could be adapted and extended to apply to a wide range of records systems including managing records inside line of business systems
Much higher adoption – the specification would be relatively easier and lower cost for both organisations and records management solution providers to adopt

At the same time the DLM Forum did not want MoReq to lose its international focus, its testing and certification programme, nor its reputation for quality.

The 2010 MoReq work programme became a year long project that resulted in the publication of the new MoReq2010 specification in June 2011. (Despite the publication date the name of the work programme stuck: for a whole year prior to publication, and through two public consultations, people had been talking about “MoReq2010”.)

Gone was the model template approach of the past, the key to meeting the goals set for MoReq2010 was modularity. The acronym “MoReq” now stood for “Modular Requirements for Records Systems”. Every part of MoReq2010 is modular. Even the core services are modular in nature. Plug-in modules allow core functionality to be replaced while extension modules allow functionality to be expanded.

It is by making MoReq2010 modular that the specification achieves the goal of greater flexibility. Beyond the core services that are common to all implementations, suppliers can pick and choose which additional functionality they wish to include in their products. New modules can be added at any time, allowing the specification to grow over time to incorporate more, different and better approaches.

It remains to be seen whether MoReq2010 will be more widely adopted than its predecessors, especially by suppliers and their applications that are not traditionally focussed on the needs of records management. But it is certainly on its way and we believe MoReq2010 has a good chance of meeting even this ambitious goal, which is why we have devoted our time to talking about it.

You can find the MoReq2010 specification published at its own dedicated moreq2010.eu website.

About the DLM Forum

The DLM Forum grew out of a 1994 resolution of the European Council to establish a multidisciplinary forum for public archives, government bodies and private sector interests. It first met in 1996, five years before the publication of MoReq, and fifteen years before the publication of MoReq2010. In 2002 the DLM Forum formally adopted a constitution and in 2010 it became the DLM Forum Foundation a not-for-profit foundation.

It is the rich diversity of DLM Forum members that still gives the organisation its character and excitement. Archivists rub shoulders with records managers, end users, expert consultants, supplier representatives, students, academics and government officials drawn from all the countries of Europe and further afield. While it remains an essentially European organisation with close ties to the European Commission, the DLM Forum welcomes interest and involvement from every continent.

This is reflected in the wide international applicability of MoReq2010 to records management across all the countries of the world.

In 2008 the DLM Forum set up the MoReq Governance Board, or MGB, to oversee the growth and adoption of the MoReq specification. If you are interested in getting involved in the activities of the DLM Forum, including those of the MGB then you can find out more from the organisation's official www.dlmforum.eu website.

Note that by using the moreq.info link as a shortcut, you can go directly to the part of the site dedicated to MoReq activities.

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