At 11:42 AM 18/03/2009, Glenn Sanders wrote:
>email archives (as sold by the IT industry) are all about DATA management,

Exactly, this is what I also found out. The agency IT folks fall for 
the message without examining the facts. I have even seen the IT 
folks trying to sell solutions with New South Wales State Records 
requirements attached to their advertising, but they had no 
understanding of the message they were pushing.  I asked a few simple 
questions of the vendor along the lines below.

How can I apply the disposal authorities to the messages in this 
vault? I then proceeded to show them the different disposal time 
frames for activities, and asked them how the system could determine 
this? Their answer was either to keep if forever, or base it on some 
arbitrary time frame, like 7 years. The facts are the systems is not 
smart enough to identify the time frame from ephemeral through to an 
archive. It needs some form of intervention or aggregation to a file 
with the disposal class assigned.

Keeping everything forever comes with risks. Destroying on a time 
frame without the application of a disposal authority also has risks. 
Then you have things like high recall and low precision, and how will 
I find something to satisfy a discovery subpoenas, freedom of 
information request or a request from the CEO.

Regards
Jenny Evans

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