E-records use testing: Introduction

Howdy, campers! Some of you may be aware from my various ramblings on Twitter etc. that I have volunteered/been enlisted to be the electronic records guy at the UWM Archives. This is not entirely an unwanted position-- I am very interested in this kind of stuff, and it's only going to become more important as the shift from paper goes on-- but it is nonetheless a challenging role because I am sort of making it up as I go along. I didn't take a single course in Library School specifically on any of metadata, databases, electronic records, or digital imaging (to say nothing about programming), and now that I have undertaken an effort to rethink the way we are dealing with e-records, that lack of specific training is obvious (to me, at least... I don't know how much it appears to be so with my colleagues, most of whom are less techie than I am).

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...)

Summer at the UWM Archives

So it occurs to me that I've sort of written myself into a corner here with this blog. I promised myself that it would be a professional-topic only blog, but the truth is I've been a bit unconcerned with professional issues lately. At least part of the reason for this is that on May 30, I got married to a very lovely and amazing woman (the one who made fun of me for not understanding the concept of Rhetoric), and we've been on honeymoon in Quebec City since May 31. So yeah, kinda busy in personal life, so not a whole lot of leeway to keep up with the professional side of things.

"But Brad, what about the Library of Congress archiving Twitter? I thought you said you were going to blog about that!"

I may have said that, and then I may have forgotten to do so. It happens. Anyway LoC came out with a press release that answered a lot of the questions I posed on my Twitter account shortly after I posed them. I still would like to write an article about this or about appraisal of social networking sites in general. We'll see if it happens.

"But Brad, what about the brouhaha on the A&A list? That's interesting, right?"

Maybe if you're a giant process nerd (which, to be fair, most of the people who read this blog are). I suspect other people would find that IMMENSELY boring and trivial. Suffice to say, it sucks that PK felt like he was being censored, and I think RAIN is an incredibly useful resource, but some of the people who jumped to his defense were perhaps a little too vehement in said defense. (What? Overreaction? That never happens on The List!) That's all I'm going to say about that.

"Well, what about the post title? Are you doing stuff this summer since you're done with all the wedding crap?"

Funny you should ask. Yes, this summer should be a very productive one for the UWM University Archives program (note use of the word "should"; best laid plans of mice and men etc etc.). A lot of good opportunities in particular for electronic records and other alternate formats, because that's the way things have worked out. (It should come as no surprise that Summer is when things get done at University Archives; no more excuses of "Oh, we have to deal with students"). At the risk of overextension, here are a few of the things I'm hoping to get done before the end of August:

• Create a good way to harvest University Communications press releases. This is actually something I've been wanting to do since I got here a few years ago but only now am I getting the actual chance to do so, having finally met with the University Communications staff through the intercession of my boss. They gave us all of their HTML press releases, which I'm having a student convert to PDF for preservation and presentation and then processing via an index. That much is good; getting the stuff from the University Communications CMS is better. Supposedly this is easily accomplished by a harvester program which the tech guy at University Communications can set up. We'll see. In any case, a good e-records case study.
• Talk with Student Activities about harvesting defunct student org files from their new CMS. Student Activities has actually been very good about keeping me in the loop about what they're doing with their records. When they decided they wanted to move their student org files to a CMS, they contacted me to ask about records management and archives specifications, which I was naturally pretty happy about. They picked the system I liked better but I haven't yet seen what the RM/Archiving capabilities are like. This is a good opportunity, though, to get in on the ground floor and make sure that proper RM is being used throughout the life of the system. Another great e-records opportunity!
  
• Properly appraise and (maybe?) digitize historical center tapes. We processed the PAPERS of the founder/director of UWM's Center for 20th Century Studies earlier this year; most of what he gave us, however, were reel-to-reel tapes of lectures given by him and other figures. Some of these are easy to appraise (Buckminster Fuller!); others are not. I'm hopefully working with some people from the Center to identify key topics and speakers and preserve the ones that have some historical value. I don't actually know if digitization is in the future for any of these, but it's a nice dream. In any case we can finally get rid of the tapes that DON'T have value and clear out some space.
• More subject guides! We've put a number of research guides on various UWM History topics, including the history of the school's mascot, Vietnam War protests, and the history of the school's football program. These guides include timelines, photos, and bibliographies for additional resources and are, in my opinion, pretty cool. I'd like to make more of them, both on specific topics and on general things like collections dealing with The Arts at UWM.
• Process the Photo Services collection and make it more accessible. In January, we accessioned probably 120,000 negatives and contact sheets from the campus photo services department. That's good! Unfortunately, most of these are not labeled adequately. That's bad. Happily, we also accessioned the indices that Photo Services was using to access the negatives. That's good! Unfortunately, these indices are all paper, meaning that it is impossible to search them except manually. That's bad. Even worse, the later ones are HANDWRITTEN, which also means we can't OCR them. So we need to figure out a way both to provide initial access to the negatives (which I think we are going to be able to do since a large number of them correspond to the contact sheets we also received) and then to provide detailed, searchable access via the indices (which I suspect is going to involve some outsourcing and/or manual data entry. My students are so lucky....) This might get its own post later this summer.
  
• Maybe get going on a campuswide EDMS initiative? Maybe? We've been stalled for a while on getting EDMS going on campus because of various budgetary concerns, but there are a few things that might get it going again:
  

1. Our interim provost, who is in his day job the dean of the iSchool here and so has some appreciation for RM concerns;
2. The systemwide adoption of the HRS recordkeeping system for Personnel Records, which might get other departments also thinking about how to keep their e-recs (it helps that the CIO here is heavily involved in its implementation);
3. The fact that we're demoing some RM software at the UWROC summer meeting, which, while this campus doesn't like the particular software being demoed, might at least get the UWROC ball rolling on how to implement SOMETHING across the various campuses.

I don't have to tell you, o faithful readers, that getting a bunch of academic departments to do ANYTHING is akin to herding cats. But maybe, just maybe, if we get the infrastructure in place some people will sign on. In the meantime, I think some additional e-recs training is in order. Remember kids, only YOU can prevent the digital dark ages! Speaking of:

• Develop online training for Records Management. This is really neat-- UWM Employee Development met with me the week before I left for my honeymoon and indicated they wanted to work with me to develop some online training modules for records management, including interactive quizzes and possible certificates. Which of course is something I've wanted to do basically since 2008, but it's good that it's finally happening. In particular they validated my argument, ignored during the UWROC webcast process, that the average employee has a 15 minute attention span and so the 50-minute behemoths aren't going to cut it. Very exciting. This WILL have its own blog post as it develops.

So yeah! Good stuff. Also in August I'm going to SAA, so I intend to blog about that as well (hopefully on the Library's dime, because D.C. is expensive, yo.) Stay tuned!

Yet another Obama giving up his BlackBerry post

See, now, THIS is how presidents should take care of their email issues:

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

I do admit that it would be awesome for him to be the 'first e-mailing president', but it sounds like his records management team has suggested to him that this would not be a good idea. Which, fair enough, given how presumably the president has better things to do than check his email obsessively. But I do think that this shows that his staff is up on some of the information problems that could occur in a 21st century presidency, which is more than I can say about the incumbent.

Sarah Palin's e-mail chicanery (Warning: Political)

I thought we had enough of this from the CURRENT administration, but no.

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!)

Zimbra, E-mail management, and all that rot

Good morning, campers! This post is being written via Zimbra, the engine underpinning PantherLink, the new email/collaboration suite that is being rolled out at UWM sometime next month (and which allows direct blog posting! Very cool). UWM's IT department is surprisingly understanding of records management needs and concerns, considering some of the horror stories I heard last week at the UWROC semi-annual meeting, and they have given me a test account to play with and check out the records management capabilities of the system. So far? I like it, with a few reservations. Not really surprising, considering it's an email system first, a collaboration system second, and a records management application last-- but it's still a bit distressing, considering how much of a problem email management is for both archivists and records managers.

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.