Mary, thanks for passing on the link to Mr. Mayer-Schonberger's research
paper. From a records management perspective, it goes without saying
that if his ideas were widely adopted about adding retention/disposition
metadata as a matter of course to digital information, our jobs could
become significantly easier.

There's an interesting progression between this research paper and the
upcoming book. In the research paper, Mr. Mayer-Schonberger conflates to
a certain degree "personal" and "institutional (for example, Google)"
memory. My suspicion is "personal" memory (ie, memory we have direct
control over) will be more profuse because of the ease to which it can
be created, and over time more ephemeral because of the technology being
used as storage. The kind of weeding he cites will actually occur due to
technical obsolescence, so that in the long term, we may actually forget
more than we remember. This isn't really explored. 

That may not be the case with "Google" memory - yet that memory is not
available to us as individuals. We are actually doing the forgetting,
its Google that is remembering. His answer is to add default automated
retention/disposition metadata to such data to ensure it is forgotten -
metadata which can be changed/extended with user permission. 

Yet, I think in this paper he's a little vague about the nature of
"memory" we are actually talking about, whereas I think the
distinctions/implications are actually pretty stark. Is it memory "of"
the individual, or memory "held by" the individual? You can see what I
mean - the two are not the same, yet the term is used interchangeably.
In my opinion, a clearer use of language would be personal "memory" held
by us as individuals, vs. personal "history" available to others. That
may be why his more recent book appears to delve into context more, as
that gives us the tools to maintain our own memory, while providing
better control over our personal history - a clearer recognition that
the two are not the same.

Dwight Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Records Management Program
1620 SE 190th Avenue
Gresham, OR 97233
phone: (503)988-3741
fax: (503)988-3754
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