This week, Open Text will be at the ARMA International's 53rd Annual Conference and Expo in Las Vegas. "This world-renown event is where professionals go for real business solutions, best practices, technology tools and innovative ideas".

I look forward to having the opportunity to speak to records managers and information management professionals about their take on "everything 2.0". What are their thoughts on digital content preservation, how do we manage content that is either user generated or heavily socialized? Are these questions keeping them up at night?

With the digitization of our information I am starting to wonder; what content will be left behind as artifacts for the next generations? Is it safe to assume that content that we deem as important will be reproducible in 20 years time?

Digital content - unlike paper - cannot be stored safely away for others to view in years to come, or can it? Digital content is more complex in nature, as we are talking about 'content in action'. Also, we are no longer creating content as a 'party of one', we are socializing our content. We are creating our content using tools such as wikis, blogs and chat instances.

In my humble opinion, if we are doing this in an enterprise arena, than it should be constituted as a record. There is no question that the long standing and revered requirement to preserve and manage records is continuing to grow in magnitude as information becomes more pervasive and yet more fluid in the digital age. The question becomes how do we retain the contextual premise of the content? How do we classify it? These amongst many other are questions that I will save for the professionals to answer next week.

We'll be providing regular updates here @ ECM Briefs including the buzz from the show floor. Or follow my real-time updates on Twitter here, using the hashtag #ARMA2008. If you are attending the show, stop by booth #711 and say hello. We are there October 20th though to the 23rd.