Tuesday, July 31, 2012
E-records use testing: Introduction
Luckily, I am far from the only person in this particular boat. SAA has been very good about getting in front of this issue, most recently through their Digital Archives Specialists certificate program. Said program purports to "provide [its participants] with the information and tools [they] need to manage the demands of born-digital records" through a series of courses at various skill levels and in various domains of practice for electronic records. The full certificate program involves 9 courses and is not cheap, so for right now I'm not focusing on finishing that (although I would like to be able to do so in the future). I was, however, able to take a course from the sequence, Arranging and Describing Electronic Records, which I found very useful in introducing me to tools and topics for getting a better handle on processing these. And so, in light of that course, I thought, "Hey, I bet other people would be interested in what we're doing with these tools and processes here at UWM. (and/or happy to tell me what it is I'm doing wrong)." And so, here we are.
I am going to structure this post series as a chronicle of working with Archives collections through the lens of various tools that I am testing, having been tipped off to the existence of said tools through the ADER workshop and other sources. (Chris Prom's Practical E-Records blog in particular has been invaluable for this.) My intent is to present my experiences and difficulties with these born-digital collections in order through the various stages of Archival Records, to wit Ingest-->Accession-->Arrangement-->Description-->Access-->Preservation. I am also cognizant, however, of the fact that the best laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley, and that not all of the tools I'm going to be looking at fit neatly into one of these categories (e.g. Archivematica and the Duke Data Accessioner). I am, however, going to give my best shot at providing a chronicle of working with these records from beginning to end, whenever "end" might be. (I'm also aware that "end" might not end up so easily defined.) Of course, because this whole process is in fact in process, the beginning is not especially well-defined either-- see next post for details-- but I'm hoping working through it in this form will help fix it for the next accession to come down the road.
So that's going to be this blog for the next few posts. Hope my readers (all 3 of you) find it useful, or at least interesting. Do feel free to comment/point out miscues/heckle/etc., as that will help me figure out where we're going wrong and point at ways to fix it. (Oh boy, I've just given people license to flame on my blog... Asbestos underwear at the ready...)
Monday, September 15, 2008
Sarah Palin's e-mail chicanery (Warning: Political)
Palin routinely uses a private Yahoo e-mail account to conduct state business. Others in the governor's office sometimes use personal e-mail accounts, too.The practice raises questions about backdoor secrecy in an administration that vowed during the 2006 campaign to be "open and transparent."
[...]
She is allowed to keep e-mails confidential if they fall into certain categories, such as "deliberative process," said her press secretary, Bill McAllister.
[...]
"I don't hear any public clamor for access to internal communications of the governor's office," McAllister said.
No, no, Mr. McAllister, that's not how Public Records Laws work. The question is not whether there IS public clamor for the records; the question is whether there COULD be public clamor, say, I don't know, if she were to run for the Vice Presidency of the United States? Admittedly I have not read the Alaska Public Records Law, but I am reasonably certain that there is not a clause in there that says "unless it would be politically inconvenient." There is a reason these things are in place, you know.
Also, it's pretty clear to me that Gov. Palin and you both know that this is sort of a disingenuous argument at best, seeing as how the whole reason that she would use a Yahoo Account is so her emails wouldn't be trackable by the State of Alaska's email system.
No one in the Palin administration could say if the governor is saving her Yahoo e-mails. If she's emptying her e-mail trash, they are zapped from Yahoo's storage system within days or at the longest, months, Yahoo says.
"If you are asking do we have those e-mails, then the answer is no," said Anand Dubey, director of the state's Enterprise Technology Services. "We don't control Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail or anything like that."
This to me seems awfully convenient, particularly in the wake of the 1100 emails that WERE on official Alaska servers which were withheld from a FOIA request on the grounds of 'executive privilege.' One has to wonder what is in the emails that aren't technically subject to Alaska public records laws. Except that they are. Unless the Governor's personal attorney says that they aren't. Hmmm.
I don't know. I just think it's very frustrating to give an email seminar in which you instruct people not to send business email from their personal accounts, and then read about a vice-presidential candidate for a major party who specifically instructs HER staff to do just that. It's enough to make a grown records manager cry.
Dean Dawson, state-records manager, is working on an e-mail-archive system for state employees, who tend to want to hang onto e-mail forever, he said. E-mail records should be kept as long as paper records of the same type — for instance, three years for general correspondence, he said. Top executives such as commissioners and the governor often must keep records longer, under state schedules.
Introducing Dean Dawson, ladies and gentlemen! The man with the most thankless job in the state of Alaska. (I would say 'in the United States', except you have to contend also with Missouri's records manager... or Texas's records manager... or the guy at NARA who has to archive the emails of the Bush Administration... Ah, right, this is why I am not working for the U.S. government!)
Friday, March 14, 2008
Library School 0, Brad's Girlfriend 1
Amazingly, I actually received replies from a number of the emailed folks. Even more amazingly, the one surveyee thus far has been more than happy to give me subject files, syllabi files, departmental review stuff, and other types of records that I have been trying to get into the archives since I arrived at UWM. Even MORE more amazingly, when I talked about the prospect of writing records schedules for some of the non-archival files, they warmed to the topic! "We haven't known what to do with these," they said. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, it seems. Who knew?
Flash forward 20 minutes from that meeting. I tell my girlfriend, who is a Rhetoric Ph.D. student at UWM, about this epiphany of mine. The following exchange occurs:
Me: Isn't that cool?
Her: Um, Brad?
Me: ...What?
Her: That's called 'rhetoric'. Talking to people to get the desired result.
Me: ...Really?
Her: Yep. So I already knew what you just told me. But I knew you would get there eventually!
Me: ...Epic fail on my part, right?
Her: Pretty much, yeah.
So, yeah. I feel pretty dumb now. On the plus side, I am slowly but surely developing tactics to better cultivate donors. (At first, I thought the acquisition of University Records was going to be easier than manuscript curating because they HAD to give them to me. How naive I was in October.) On the minus side, this really IS the kind of thing they should be teaching us in Library School, rather than Dialog or semantic frames or similar nonsense. I want my money back. (Well, not really, I did learn stuff in my actual archives courses. On the other hand, it WAS a lot of money...)
Speaking of information architecture, I've just read David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous and have some thoughts, but those are for a different post.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Zimbra, E-mail management, and all that rot
So, without further ado:
THE GOOD
--Tags! Oh man, tags are exciting, and they're implemented here very well. Unlike a lot of tag-enabled applications, which make you input tags separately for each email, Zimbra lets you tag a document, then saves that tag in a visual tag library with color-coded icons. This is REALLY useful for taxonomy, because if a user sees tags, and they are readily available for application to emails, that user is more likely to apply them to the emails they receive. This, in turn, makes searching for e-discovery, reference, etc. That much more likely. Well done Zimbra!
--The Ajax-based UI is a gigantic improvement over the PantherMail interface currently in use. Essentially, what Ajax does for the client is to allow for full interactivity in email management. In practical purposes, this means that things I was doing with Thunderbird-- dragging files, right-clicking to get email properties, etc.-- can be done through the web interface. This is fantastic for standardizing RM training for emails (more people are likely to use the webclient, which in turn means that I don't have to present three scenarios), and also makes it more likely that emails will be dragged to appropriate tags/folders. Speaking of which:
--The foldering schema in Zimbra allows for multi-level hierarchy, which is something not even Thunderbird does. This is great for records management purposes, because it allows users to organize by subject and date, which can (in theory) correspond to records series and disposition date. Of course, this is all still dependent on user application, but to a certain extent this can be partially automated by:
--Message filtering, which appears as a big blue plus sign on every email. With a little training on setting up filters, people can send emails from a certain address or containing certain subject terms directly to the appropriate folder, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 or create inbox clutter. I tell people to use Thunderbird because it has this functionality, but if the web client ALSO has the functionality people may be inclined to use that AND to set up filters.
--Advanced search capabilities built right in, including the use of all appropriate metadata (including tags) as well as keyword search. I don't need to mention how nice this is.
THE BAD
--As far as I can tell, there is no mechanism for actually archiving emails. This is obviously a major flaw from a records management standpoint, exacerbated by the problem from an IT standpoint of people keeping everything on the email server again instead of downloading to a departmental server. This, in turn, will lead to more "reduce your inbox size"-type emails from IT, which will lead to more difficulties with record emails being destroyed. I am hoping this will be addressed in the PantherLink meetings to which I have been invited, but I (admittedly no techie, but at the very least a "clueful user") couldn't figure it out from here.
--A lot of functionality-- but I wonder if that may also lead people to conclude it's too busy. Right now, I count 21 buttons and/or tabs to push on the main screen, and I suspect people-- particularly non-tech-savvy people-- might get intimidated by that, thus not using the RM functionality of the program at all. Similarly:
--The Ajax UI is radically different from the HTML interface being used by the PantherMail system currently in place. For me this is good because I like new and shiny things. For a lot of people this will be bad because they've gotten in the groove of their old email system and don't want to learn a new one. Ultimately, this will result in a lot of people not using the RM functionality out of sheer orneriness. In addition:
--While some aspects of the UI are very user-friendly, like dragging files and creating folders, others are, well, not. For example, it took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to even CREATE a tag, let alone how to apply a pre-existing tag to an already-existing email. This will ultimately mean A TON of training resources expended on my part and on the part of UITS. Speaking of which:
--Zimbra does not, as far as I can tell, include functionality for top-down tag dissemination or categorization. This is problematic because if I don't have the power to make tags immediately available for insertion into people's clients, they will invent their own tags, categories, and folders. This works well for one-computer searching, but not so well for multi-computer searching of the kind that universities often have to do. To a certain extent I can ameliorate this by posting a list of suggested tags on the RM website or something, but again, it's a case of "you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink".
THE UGLY
--The Help menu, in addition to not working right at the moment, takes you to a page on purging the trash folder when you click on "archiving email" in the index listing of topics. Yikes. I hope that's just a link error and not what passes for records management at the Zimbra corporate offices, 'cause if so I think a couple of fellows named Sarbanes and Oxley are going to want to have a few words with them.
So, my initial impressions? As an email management system, very good! This will help a lot of people keep their emails straight, which means less work for me in explaining to people how to find that one email. As an enterprise records management system, less good! There doesn't seem to be any account taken for disposition, workflow, or even exporting of email into a program that CAN do that stuff. Which is fine, considering that Zimbra didn't design the client to incorporate disposition scheduling or archiving, so I can't really blame them for doing that. But it also means more work for me in attempting to come up with a workaround for the lack of university-wide control. If it's helping people organize their emails it's probably a no-score win, but when people start deleting stuff to meet quotas... Oy.
Anyway, this is all subject to change after the PantherLink meetings and/or the actual rollout. We'll see what happens.
ETA: Apparently, I'm not the first person to note that there's no archiving tool in the Zimbra Client, as a little poking around on their website yielded a link to Zimbra Archiving and Discovery. So I stand partially corrected. However, I will keep the original concern up in the post because this is an add-on rather than an automatically included part of the Zimbra email client, and at $24/mailbox, I'm not sure that UITS will be entirely happy to invest in that. Also, the archiving/discovery functionality is administrator-based, which DOES take the onus off of users to archive their email (good) but relies entirely on the discretion of the IT professionals to determine which mailboxes and email messages are worth keeping (potentially not so good). Anyway, I reserve judgment until such time as I actually meet with the PantherLink folks and voice these concerns.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Yeah... that went well.
In any case. Since my introductory post waaaay back in August, I have been hired as Records Archivist for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, so this blog is going to take a slightly different turn than I originally envisioned. As Records Archivist, I am responsible for maintaining, processing, and providing access to the records produced by the various offices on campus. But wait, there's more! I am also the University Records Officer (The title on my business cards), which in Wisconsin means that I am the representative of the State Archivist on the University and pass along his permission (actually the permission of the Public Records Board) to destroy records according to state law. Furthermore, my OFFICIAL title is Academic Archivist I, which means I ALSO deal with manuscript collections that pertain to the university but aren't actual university records, such as the records of Student Organization. As you can tell, I wear a bunch of different hats in this job. And yes, all of them are silly.
As a result of the above, this blog is going to have a very definite Records Management bias-- I will talk about scheduling, policy development, records surveys, General Records Schedule development, e-records disposition, and training and outreach issues. But, again, because my official title is as an ARCHIVIST, I will also take on archives-specific issues of access systems, appraisal strategies, description and cataloging (I still <3 EAD, even if my job doesn't involve me using it a lot), reference, and fun stuff like format issues and exhibit design. Plus, if all else fails, I'll just talk about what I'm working on right now. Because, I gotta say, guys, this job is pretty great and most of the time that will actually be interesting.
For example: Right now I am doing preliminary appraisal and writing a processing plan for a collection we received from University Relations. This collection is all photographs, which I've had some experience with, but never with anything this extensive-- and it's great. Part of it is publication files from UWM newsletters and such, but most of it is detailed subject files-- campus scenes and important/yearly events and celebrity visits and important people on campus and aerials of Milwaukee. This is a fantastic collection, I don't mind telling you. I kind of envy the student who's going to be working on this collection for her field study-- she's going to be the one who really gets to go in-depth looking at the photos and doing the cool arrangement and description work (although, as her site advisor, presumably I will have something to do with it). It will be interesting to see how she chooses to approach the collection in arranging and describing it, and I'm excited to get this collection ready for the big show (i.e. the Processed Collections page).
So yeah, that's me right now. Doing some appraisal, meeting with some offices, writing some Records Retention and Disposition Authorities for office approval, and, you know, writing the blog. Oh! And doing research on email preservation, more about which later. Right now I should get back to work.