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<DIV>Hello again, all:</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Great exchanges this week. It may not be too late to share some views on
the issue of demographic groups in considering personal e-recs, which I
will do here. It is, however, late in the week and day to get much
into the topic of <EM>products</EM> (a word thus far mentioned this
week only in Cathy's opening salvo, Monday.) If there is appetite to do so, it
may be a subject worthy of an extension of this discussion or as
a separate future one with someone as much on the front lines as Cathy to
guide and respond to she has this week. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Nevertheless, I will offer some thoughts on this later aspect in a separate
em.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>But first, I want to say how pleased I am to see this discussion of
personal e-records take place. While serving on a Society of American
Archivists' program committee several years ago, I thought that before I opened
my mouth about program/speaker ideas, I might check with the SAA
to see who the clients of the upcoming conference were in fact. I was
greatly surprised to learn that a significant majority (one stat I was given was
75%) of SAA members were manuscript archivists. (I wonder if this might be
similarly true for the ACA. Anyone?) If any group should be on top of
personal e-recs, I would think it would be MSS archivists. But they seemed
little in evidence on conference agenda for some reason. Surely, even already,
the records of the subjects of MSS archives must be boomers whose records must
increasingly be digital, and disparately so I would imagine. How are these
records -- some from important philanthropists, government officials,
authors -- being captured? How are they being transferred to willed to
university collections or others? What tools are at the disposal of their
curators? How good are they? Perhaps this group is on top of this subjects,
perhaps in one of the SAA Roundtables or Sections in which I'm not a member. If
so, my apologies, and I submit that we would all benefit from hearing their
views on some of these questions and how much the software development community
is informed by their needs and views. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The seemingly total lack of discussion of this topic in the main archives
and records management (ARM) literature and discourse (or in trade
circles), prompted me several years ago to add to the mybestdocs.com HOT TOPICS
page, one for <EM>Personal E-Recs</EM> where I've republished a few
excellent papers and other resource on the subject. Although my Website's focus
is mainly, not only, on electronic records, I was very happy to see SISPA born
(thank you Catherine, Heather, et all) and was especially happy to see
personal e-recs arise as a discussion theme with the group.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>DEMOGRAPHIC DISTINCTIONS</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Re Cathy's comment on why people let crashes happen, which I'll use to
segue into the demographics issue: </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV><FONT id=role_document face=Arial color=#000000 size=2><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV>In a message dated 4/27/2009 10:25:49 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
cathymar@microsoft.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Calibri color=#000000 size=2>
<P class=Default><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">This cycle of accumulation and
accidental loss might underlie explanations that consumers offer for failing
to backup their computers. In the end, people may be unhappy about data loss,
but they shrug it off, all too frequently saying exactly the same thing:
</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">“I mean, if we would’ve had a fire, you
just move on.”</FONT></FONT></FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV>I'm sure that's true for some people but, in my opinion, it depends a great
deal (as does just about every other topic we have taken or might take up on
this subject) on the demographics of the individual or group in question. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>-- Those who view pers erecs as archivists or records managers through
professional eyes. During the week we have seen this perspective with the
concerns we should expect from ARM pros -- appraisal, media capture and
preservation, etc. These are properly the concern of people who are faced with
the management of the personal records of others, as with manuscript archivists.
</DIV>
<DIV>-- The multitude of users who are in no way connected with ARM.</DIV></DIV>
<DIV>-- Age and exposure. Gen-X-ers likely will have a special perspective:
the tools that were there when they were born or shortly thereafter, who have
grown up with rapidly changing social patterns and technology. (My 40-something
son who not long ago was quite happy with his old cell phone recently bought
into a Blackberry and paid for an upgraded unlimitedtext service . He said:
my kids don't email, they text. If that is the only way I can keep in touch with
my kids during these times, that's how I'll do it.)</DIV>
<DIV>-- Seniors, and even within the seniors group, one has to distinguish
between the needs of those who took up PCs only in their
post-retirement years and mainly to keep in touch with their kids and grandkids
versus those of us who were either in the IT business going way back or who
were otherwise early adopters who have been hanging around computers for a half
century and PCs from their beginnings. This is an important demographic for
system developers to understand. Some market forecasts I've seen suggest that
seniors are one of the strongest real and potential markets, because of their
post-retirement, empty-nest, disposable income -- these forecasts preceded
the other recent crash. </DIV>
<DIV>-- What applications one has become reasonably facile in using. Is s/he an
email-only user or user of other office systems, special apps. </DIV>
<DIV>-- IT skills. How comfortable they are in reacting to problems as they
arise? Do they know how to navigate awful technical support online info
bases, get chat help or even human phone technical support help (often quite
expensive or a secret highly guarded by our tech firms with draconian phone
response menus), etc. (An old friend actually still sends thoughtful,
wonderful-to-get, thank-you notes for dinners at our home that are written
on charming paper notes with one of those <EM>postage stamps</EM> on
the envelopes! Imagine. She takes genuine pride in not being computer
literate. She called us the other day and said: don't send us any
emails until you get one from me. I'm waiting until my grandson next comes
over to fix my cursed system.)</DIV>
<DIV>--Reason for keeping electronic records. Are they scrap book
collectors, including newspaper clippings on subjects of interest to
them, other people's recipes, other collectibles? Or are they also
seriously trying to maintain family records that they consider important to be
easy accessible by their survivors, or even for posterity? (Eight years
ago, when my wife and I witnessed the difficulties several older friends were
experiencing in their homes, we got serious about our own
affairs and designed and had built a 1-level universal
design (multi-generational) home, 1/2 the size of our previous,
loved, 4-level home. At the same time, we talked to friends who had
recently lost a parent and the problems they faced and began to get our papers
in better order -- not just legal stuff, but other things: making a list of
email addresses of people we would want notified, writing up short personal
bios, at least beginning to mark up old photos, writing down some family
stories, etc. These records shouldn't be buried in a PC directory only, but be
accessible and kept up to date in other ways and, yes, replicated in some way
that takes account of concerns about proprietary formats in which they were
created. Some, like wills, have to be kept in paper and ideally given to
survivors as soon as they are finalized. Others need not be and might be much
more convenient to access electronically than keeping in multiple paper copies.
In particular, family photos fall into this category.</DIV>
<DIV>-- Other recordkeeping for important records. Do people with important
paper needs manage their own important records or lease the service? (A few
years ago, I advised a wealth management company that was building a
service to manage the personal financial e-records of clients in the
$multi-million category.)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Viewing personal archives should, in my view, carefully consider the
glasses with which they are being viewed.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I hope that more people will not only take up IT beyond email and embrace
word processing and other tools that support e-journals, including social
networking tools, especially seniors with a bit more discretionary time
available, because it is the seniors who hold most of the family records and
stories. They are like -- I can't resist -- HHDs -- not the "hybrid
hard disk" kind provided with VISTA that MS calls ReadyDrive, but rather
the "human hard drives". When the <EM>human </EM>one crashes, it represents a
family records crash that On-Track can't recover. So long as there are not good
and simple products to support such needs, many -- even computer
literate -- will start but quit after a while because it is just too much to
manage and takes too much of ones time. (Which is why I quit using Quicken a
long time ago. For me, it was just too much overhead to do so.)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>This realization within my own family prompted me to start a draft family
e-journal on my Website with stories going back to my deceased brother's account
as a naval gunnery officer and Pearl Harbor survivor, including an image of a
most revealing letter-home that he sent one month to the day before the attack.
Most of this I owe to a wealth of hometown newspaper clippings of his War
campaigns that mom kept along with pics, a few contextual notes of her own and
other such markers in her scrap book. She gave portions of her collection
to my brother, and he to his daughter (one of my favorite Luddites), who
was delighted to pass it all to me to "do something about" and whose
own daughter abroad was looking forward to accessing. Other portions of my
mother's collection related to my own youth and naval aviator days in Vietnam,
and still others were passed on to my other brothers, some of whom don't have
much interest in doing anything with. Unfortunately, I didn't get interested
in doing something with these objects, now largely "brown and brittle"
until recently. My 40-something kids are only now beginning to show
some glimmer of interest in such matters, but I feel that will change later on.
My point? At least for the older (but good market demographic) gen, we need some
good <EM>products, </EM>to accompany sound recordkeeping practices. More on that
separately.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Regards,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Rick</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
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