Frederic Grevin is Vice President of the Records Management Department in New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC-- http://www.nycedc.com/about-nycedc). NYCEDC, a private non-profit organisation, is the main driving force for the economic development of New York City, charged with capitalising on the city’s assets in order to stimulate growth, create jobs and improve quality of life. The Records Management Department is tasked with the systematic and centralised management of the organisation’s archives throughout their life cycle. This includes management of archives in all formats - electronic and paper-based. The increased volume and complexity of electronic archives demands an appropriate investment in personnel. Three out of four archivists have a Master's in Librarian Science, and the fourth has several years of experience with electronic archives.

Records management is a very big market in the New York region, involving private stakeholders (finance, pharmaceutical and medical departments and private universities) and public stakeholders (federal government, State of New York and municipality departments).

Devastating fire in Brooklyn, New York, USA. On 31 January 2015, a fire destroyed an archive warehouse belonging to the company CitiStorage/Recall. More than 31,000m3 of archives, private and public, were burned or severely damaged. The enquiry does not indicate criminal involvement, but rather a failure to follow procedure. A small fire had taken hold immediately beforehand; the automatic fire-extinguishing system had been activated, the alarm sounded, the city’s firefighters had arrived on the scene, and it seemed that the fire had been extinguished. The automated system was then deactivated (to control flooding), but it seems that no-one kept watch in order to ensure that the fire had fully gone out. In fact, the fire was still smouldering and rekindled into an uncontrollable blaze. The moral of this story is that the non-application of an essential procedure can render the best automated fire-extinguishing system ineffective. See the infra-red photo of the warehouse in flames (photo: New York City Fire Department),as well as the New York Times article: (Fire at a Brooklyn Warehouse Puts Private Lives on Display. Feb. 1, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/nyregion/large-warehouse-fire-continues-to-burn-in-brooklyn.html).