This discussion has gotten me thinking.  When you are working within 
your organizations to ensure the retention of electronic records, what 
kind of input are you getting from the end users --- not just in the 
near term, but also those who work with knowledge in long arcs.  I 
don't mean just talking to the people in the records creating offices.  
I know you do that.  Of course, the people in the records creating 
office often will not be the ones whose successors will be fielding 
complex internal inquiries in the future.  I'm thinking instead of the 
people whose successors will be on the other end of the phone when the 
head of your organization or your General Counsel calls up and needs to 
trace some information or knowledge 20 years from now.

The people receiving internal and external inquiries are likely to be 
in house lawyers, archivists, corporate historians, etc.  How much 
input do you get from them in considering issues related to the 
preservation of electronic knowledge?  Are you able to analyze the 
types of questions that your historians, archivists, and lawyers have 
been answering over the longterm?  For example, do you  have an 
opportunity to read and examine for reference patterns the policy 
papers and analyses that they have been required to write?  Or to talk 
to them about the type of reference inquiries they have been answering 
in house?  I'm curious how you are ensuring that the information they 
accessed in the days of hard copy records will be preserved in the 
digital age.

This sounds like a no brainer but you would be surprised what might 
fall through the cracks.  I'm thinking not about items that you are 
legally compelled to keep, but about the other sources which typically 
form part of an organization's insitutional memory.  Consider, for 
example, some of the items that once were accessioned into and made 
available in an organization's library.  Many of these were 
publications, something you assumed the librarians would take care of 
preserving.

Take internal telephone directories, for example.  In many 
organizations, these once were published once or twice a year.  So, if 
needed,  you could use them to confirm that Person X headed Unit Y in 
Division Z from approximately June of 1965 to December of 1973.  As an 
historian, I find old published directories useful to look up 
information when an internal requester asks for something that hinges 
in part on when someone worked in a particular unit.  Or where a 
function was placed several realignments ago.  The same is true for 
going to the library to look at old policy manuals, binders of internal 
directives, etc.

Nowadays, an organization is likely to be posting organizational 
telephone directories, manual updates, directives, etc. on its internal 
webpage as dynamic content.  Maybe your organization has stopped 
producing these in hard copy.  Your library may no longer have any hard 
copies to accession into its collections.  So who is saving them and 
how?

Is someone making sure that the various iterations of the web-based 
directories, manuals, etc., which once were in the purview of 
librarians, still are being saved?  Are your organizations working to 
develop reference portals that preserve rather than simply overwrite 
dynamic information?  Or will your historians, archivists, and lawyers 
be stuck shrugging their shoulders and telling an irate requester 20 
years from now, "no one thought to preserve that information when we 
went electronic.  We can't trace the information you want, there's a 
knowledge gap for that time period."  Hopefully, that won't happen with 
a matter in litigation, I know I would hate to be the one who has to 
say,"ooops, that's long gone, no one kept that once our Library stopped 
accessioning hard copies."

Just wondering -- a by-product of the old paper versus electronic 
debate.  Any thoughts are welcoem!

Maarja

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