I find the whole issue very unsettling. As Peter mentioned, the fact
that it's digital does not make it easy to apply retention in the same
we can for physically tangible records. Then I think, do these
conversations exist elsewhere? In most cases, they probably do and are
therefore documented in other ways. Which then leads me to the following
course of reasoning: Records only capture a portion, often a very small
and limited portion of a whole transaction. For example, I just closed
on a property and the closing documents only show a fraction of the
whole months long transaction from submitting the application to getting
the keys 4 months later. Archives only receive a small portion (usually
5-7%) of an entity's recorded transactions. What ends up recorded, and
then what ends up getting to a repository is very little. If listservs
don't make it to the archive, maybe it's not so bad and not so out of
the ordinary. In court one must pledge to tell the whole truth; records
can never tell the whole truth since they can never document everything
about a transaction, something is always left out.
Back to the listserv. If our efforts are pursued and recorded on many
fronts, then something will be saved somewhere, just maybe not from the
listserv. In our age of information-overload, this is quite likely. This
is my justification, and I question it all the time.
That's my 2 cents.
Stephen Cohen, MLIS
Document Controls Manager
MARNELL CONSULTING
222 Via Marnell Way
Las Vegas, Nevada 89119
(702) 739-5765 Phone
(702) 739-2045 Fax
(203) 376-5535 Mobile
www.marnellcorrao.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Peter Kurilecz
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 6:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: SAA removes listserv archives
On 3/15/07, Mark Myers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
What I see here is a problem of trying to apply physical records
retention rules to a digital environment. In a physical world the
retention for something like a listserv would be very short-term due
to the transitory nature of the information, the vast noise to signal
ratio and finally the difficulty of locating key information amongst
thousands of individual physical messages if the listserv were
conducted using physical mail. A good retention schedule would say
that a sampling of the physical messages (say 1-5% ) should be
retained for archival purposes to document how the list was used by
the participants. Then one would need to determine how to do the
sampling, random, ever 100th message? every thousandth message?
But an electronic environment turns the schedule on its head since you
now have the ability via a search engine (either something like google
or the listserv native search function) that allows you to search
listserv archives ignoring the detritus and locating the information
you seek. plus since it is web-based the user can bookmark the message
they have located, print it out or capture it in pdf format.
this whole issue is turning out to be a PR nightmare for SAA.
--
Peter Kurilecz CRM CA
Richmond, VA
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