Nagging Topic: What to do about Email?
1. Distinguish between policies and guidelines.
2. Reduce the volume of email.
3. Donít let email interrupt other work.
4. Make emails concise and clear.
5. Get backups and archiving under control.
6. Communicate your goals ó and keep them realistic.
Read the full article by Margaret Steen here.
This excellent article gets the IM issue out of the closet, presents its pros and cons and compares current IM products. Unfortunately, it fails to even mention the fact that, like email, IM can very well constitute records, and the issues that gives rise to even beyond those with email, due to the absence of necessary metadata and related recordkeeping functionality. Clearly, CIO, corporate attorneys and other executives are going to have to go through the same learning process as was the case with email. RB
"E-mail and Potentail Loss to Future Archives and Scholarship or The Dog that Didn't Bark," by Susan S. Lukesh." First Monday, Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet, Volume 4 Number 9 ó September 6th 1999 pattern has emerged in starting presentations on the preservation of electronic materials: Disaster! In 1975, the U.S. Census Bureau discovered that only two computers on earth can still read the 1960 census. The computerized index to a million Vietnam War records was entered on a hybrid motion picture film carrier that cannot be read. The bulk of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's research since 1958 is threatened because of poor storage. These tales are akin to Jorge Luis Borges's short story in which the knowledge of the world is concentrated in one mammoth computer - and the key is lost. The essential question for the Information Age may well be how to save the electronic memory (Stielow: 333)."
XML for Digital Preservation: XML Implementation Options for Emails - HTML by Maureen Potter. "This paper presents...work we have undertaken at the Digital Preservation Testbed in the Netherlands using XML as a preservation approach...I will...discuss the advantages and disadvantages of XML for archival preservation, and identify the attributes of email as a record type that make it particularly suitable for conversion to XML. This paper will then focus on the three different implementation options...The first two are intended for use on emails that have already been transmitted...The third is an Ďadd-iní that is integrated with the email application (in our case Outlook), and that creates and stores an XML representation of the message at the same time that it is originally transmitted.
"Save That Mail: Store e-mails properly, or you could face stiff fines," by Mary K. Pratt, Computerworld, January 27, 2003. Archiving e-mails has become serious business as courts, government
officials and industry regulators increasingly order expensive searches and issue stiff fines for lost or poorly stored e-mails. Thanks to Larry Medina for the heads-up on this article.
"Self-shredding e-mail," by Chris Seper, Plain Dealer Reporter, Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 15, 2002. An upcoming version of Microsoft's e-mail program Outlook will let authors decide how long an e-mail message will exist and whether it can be sent to other people or printed out for posterity.
"Companies Rethink What to Shred, and When," by Jonathan D. Glater, New York Times, July 12, 2002. Spurred by repeated scandals and the specter of legislation, companies are examining their document-retention policies, making sure that the procedures are up to date and that employees are complying with them, according to lawyers who advise corporations. Companies are also struggling with questions of what to do about electronic documents.
Electronic Mail (E-Mail) and Records Management, by Rick Barry.
Ethical, Privacy and Property Rights Issues
"2001 AMA Survey: Workplace Monitoring & Surveillance: Policies and Practices: Summary of Key Findings"
"Ethical Implications of Privacy in Electronic Mail", by Victoria A. White, from "Proceedings of Technical Conference on Telecommunications R&D in Massachusetts", University of Massachusetts, Lowell, October 25, 1994.