Understanding and Empowering the Individual Preserving the Public Record and Institutional History

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Understanding and Empowering the
IndividualPreserving the Public Record and
Institutional History
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Email Management, Electronic Records, and Beyond

• Dr. Helen R. Tibbo
• School of Information and Library Science
• UNC-Chapel Hill
• Timothy Pyatt
• Duke Unversity
• http//www.ils.unc.edu/digitaldesktop

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Thought for the day.

• The end-user manages e-mail.
• -ARMA Guideline for Managing E-mail

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Thank You to

• The National Historical Publications and Records
  Commission
• for funding this project

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Goals for Today

• Project background, goals, and objectives.
• Discussion of the methodologies used for data
  collection and analysis in this project.
• Overview of findings.
• Presentation of FAQs.
• Training tools slides and tutorial.

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Digital Desktop Project Team

• Dr. Helen Tibbo, Co-PI, Professor, UNC-SILS
• Dr. Paul Conway, Director, Digital Asset
  Initiatives, Duke Libraries, Duke
• Kim Chang, Co-Project Manager
• Megan Winget, Co-Project Manager, SILS Ph.D.
  student
• Timothy Pyatt, University Archivist, Duke
• Janis Holder, University Archivist, UNC
• David Mitchell, Records Manager, Duke
• Frank Holt, Records Manager, UNC
• Ruth Monnig, SILS Ph.D. Student, 1st PM
• Russell Koonts, Archivist, DUMC

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Advisory Board

• Deborah Barreau, Asst. Professor, SILS
• Michel Bezy, Program Director, Strategy Autonomic
  Computing, IBM
• Elizabeth Bunting, Assoc. VP for Legal Affairs,
  UNC System
• Mark Crowell, Asst. V-C for Economic Development,
  UNC Charles Dollar, Archival Consultant Eric
  Mlyn, Director of Robinson Scholars Program
• Joel Dunn, Director, Networking Collaboration,
  UNC
• Kelly Eubank, Electronic Records Archivist, NC
  Dept. Cultural Resources
• Roslyn Holdzkom, Asst. Curator of Manuscripts,
  UNC
• Madeleine Perez, University Archivist,
  UNC-Charlotte
• Joanna Carey Smith, Associate University Counsel,
  UNC
• Jeanne Smythe, Director, Computing Policy, UNC

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Project Goals - 1

• Document how faculty, administrators, and staff
  use and manage files and records from electronic
  mail and other desktop applications at UNC-CH,
  Duke University, and by extension, throughout the
  16-campus UNC system and across academia

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Project Goals - 2

• Based on the analysis of user needs and
  practices, as well as the North Carolina Public
  Records Act, develop optimized e-mail and desktop
  management "best practice" guidelines to serve
  both public and private higher education in North
  Carolina and provide an adaptable model of
  practice for other states.

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Project Goals - 3

• Develop educational opportunities (workshops,
  FAQs, exercises, web-based courses, etc.) to
  optimize faculty, administrator, and staff use
  and management of desktop electronic documents.

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Project Goals - 4

• Develop user profiles necessary for a strategic
  consideration of electronic records management
  systems and use these to evaluate the potential
  appropriateness of ERMSs for the UNC-CH and Duke
  campuses.

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AndDissemination

• Disseminate information about the best practices
  guidelines and instructional units at UNC, Duke,
  and across the 16-campus UNC system via a
  statewide conference and to other universities
  via the records management/ archival literatures
  and conferences and the project website.

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Methodology

• In order to learn how faculty, staff, and
  administrators manage their electronic materials
  we
• Conducted campus-wide surveys at UNC-Chapel Hill
  and Duke University.
• Interviewed 100 individuals.
• Interviewed approximately 15 IT staff.
• We coded and analyzed the data from the
  interviews using NVIVO software.

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Best Answer?

• Helping people become information management
  literate.
• Moving people toward better practice.
• Realizing that telling people to manage
  electronic files as paper has not been
  effective.

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Who We Surveyed

• 8,334 addresses at UNC.
• 17,327 addresses at Duke.
• About 212 emails bounced at UNC.
• About 1,115 bounced at Duke.

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1899 Valid Duke Survey Respondents
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1076 Valid UNC Responses
432
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Survey Questions

• Email application most often used
• Volume/time spent on email
• Attachments
• Storage practices
• Importance to job
• Specific Concerns
• Willingness to do further interview

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Interview Protocol Development

• Went back to our original goals.
• To understand how individuals manage their
  digital desktops, both email messages and digital
  files.
• To devise guidelines, aids, and learning models
  to support improved user behavior.
• What are people doing?
• How can we improve what they are doing both for
  their own work and for the university?

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Designing the Interviews

• Started with the concerns that surfaced in the
  survey returns.
• Generated every possible question we could
  devise, in probably as inappropriate forms as we
  could.
• Pooled our questions.
• Used words like, appraisal, and authenticity.

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Developing the Conceptual Framework

• Categorized our questions.
• Because we are exploring how individuals are
  functioning as their own records managers and
  archivists, we linked our questions to basic
  archival functions.

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Framework for Questions

• Electronic files must undergo appraisal in order
  to assess their importance, potential for
  long-term preservation, and their recordness.
• In order to ensure authenticity, particular
  actions must happen and particular information
  must be created and preserved.

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Interview Framework

• In order to preserve electronic records, the
  digits and their context must be physically
  secured and preserved.
• Arrangement in a logical file structure can be
  useful in making electronic records accessible.

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Framework for Study

• In order for electronic records to be accessible
  they must be described clearly and adequately.
  Description can involve indexing, abstracting,
  and other additional subject analysis or simply
  file naming and titling.

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Framework

• How individuals view ownership of electronic
  materials and issues of privacy and security will
  influence how they handle the items. Thus, we
  need to ask individuals to whom they believe the
  messages belong, what rights they have to privacy
  of the message content, and how secure the
  messages/email system is.

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Appraisal questions

• What criteria do you use to decide to keep an
  email message? To delete one?
• What criteria do you use to decide to keep an
  electronic document? To delete one?
• Do you think any of the email messages or
  documents that you receive or produce in the
  course of your daily work should be preserved for
  years to come by the university? Why?/Why not?

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Authenticity Questions

• How do you save attachments?
• When you save an attachment, do you save the
  email message along with it?
• If you store important messages electronically
  outside of your email application, does the
  header information stay with the messages?

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Arrangement

• Tell me about your email/file folder structure
  that we see here.
• Get print-out of folder structure.
• Would you say that you use a similar structure in
  email and file directories?
• Paper file structure?
• Tell us about the file structure on your hard
  drive. How have you organized materials?

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Description

• How do you determine subject lines you attach to
  work-related email messages you send?
• How do you retrieve stored messages if you need
  them at a later time?
• How do you name electronic files?
• How do you retrieve your electronic files?

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Physical Preservation

• Are your email messages being backed up
  automatically?
• Do you explicitly back up your email messages?
• Are your electronic files (documents, images,
  etc.) automatically backed up?
• Do you keep copies of all the messages you send?
  If so, where/how do you keep these?
• How do you store important messages?

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Privacy Security

• Is your email yours or the universitys? Other
  files on your UNC computer?
• Who owns your email? (Ownership vs. intellectual
  property issues with this question)
• Who can has the ability to read your email
  without your permission? Your electronic files?
• Do you distinguish between "official" and
  personal email? Do you manage and store them
  differently?
• UNC ONLY Have you heard of the Public Records
  law in North Carolina?

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Interview Participants

• Goal was to interview a wide cross-section of
  faculty, staff, and administrators at both
  campuses.
• Only selected people who indicated they wished
  further involvement after the survey.

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Selection Framework

• Tried to apply Samuels Varsity Letters model
• Confer credentials
• Convey knowledge
• Foster socialization
• Conduct research
• Sustain the institution
• Provide public service
• Promote culture

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Samuels Model Did Not Work

• We could not break all the individuals we had
  from the survey into Samuels 7 categories.
• Job titles did not reflect job functions.
• We decided we didnt know enough about our
  population to apply a model blindly.
• We would select from faculty and staff from
  various departments and administrative units.

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Interviews

• We conducted 100 interview during spring and
  summer of 2003.
• Most averaged 45 minutes in length with some over
  an hour, some briefer.
• One person interviewed another took notes in a
  spreadsheet.

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Coding

• Took each interview note session and coded using
  NVIVO software.
• Developed codes for each question and reconciled
  over entire set of questions.
• Two people coded all the questions.
• Reconciled disparate codes and coding.

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Life After Coding

• Next step was to make charts and tables for as
  many quantifiable questions as possible.
• Highlight useful and telling quotations within
  notes.
• Explore data topically.

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Building the FAQs

• Looked at Email handling guidelines.
• Looked at FAQs.
• Looked at our data.
• Studied NC Public Records Law.
• Designed preliminary FAQs.
• Held focus group of UNC Duke interview
  participants.
• Revised and fleshed out FAQs and site design.

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History of FAQs

• Originally we thought the right manual had not
  been created but that we would write it!
• Many manuals appeared but life was not better.
• Reluctantly we concluded people dont read
  manuals.
• We hope people will consult the FAQs.

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Findings Lots of Behaviors

• Pilers and filers.
• Obsessive-compulsive organizers.
• The mess-tolerant.

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Lots of Different Practices

• Different email applications.
• Different capabilities of each system.
• Different understanding of security, backup, and
  privacy.

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The Times They Are A-Changin

• How do people manage email after GMail?
• No file
• No weed
• How does this influence management of other
  materials?
• Records management in the day of extreme
  personalization????

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Implications for Archivists Records Managers

• Powerful search engines.
• Successful searching/sorting in email and our
  other large files depends on personal knowledge
  as well as search engine.
• Archival community, partnered with the IT
  community must come up with new retrieval
  paradigms.

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Next Steps

• Make useful changes to the tools you will see
  today based on your input.
• Write articles for American Archivist and other
  journals.
• Input what we learned into the design of
  electronic records management at UNC and Duke.
• Final report to NHPRC.

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Regrets Future Studies

• Regret we couldnt interview enough people to say
  definitively
• Faculty to this staff to that
• Dukies do this Tar Heels do that
• Need to study behavior now and see influence of
  new software.
• Data mining techniques need to be developed.