[Personal_archives] distinctions among user types and benign neglect as s...

[RICKBARRY at aol.com]

Hello again, all:
 
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 products (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. 
 
Nevertheless, I will offer some thoughts on this later aspect in a separate 
 em.
 
But first, I want to say how pleased I am to see this discussion of  per
sonal 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. 
 
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 Personal E-Recs 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.
 
DEMOGRAPHIC DISTINCTIONS
 
Re Cathy's comment on why people let crashes happen, which I'll use to  
segue into the demographics issue: 
 
In a message dated 4/27/2009 10:25:49 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
cathymar at microsoft.com writes:

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:   “I mean, if we would’ve had a fire, 
you  just move on.”
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. 
 
 

-- 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. 
-- The multitude of users who are in no way connected with ARM.

-- 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.)
-- 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. 
-- What applications one has become reasonably facile in using. Is s/he an  
email-only user or user of other office systems, special apps. 
-- 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 postage stamps 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.)
--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.
-- 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.)
 
Viewing personal archives should, in my view, carefully consider the  
glasses with which they are being viewed.
 
 
 
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 human 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.)
 
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 products, to accompany sound recordkeeping practices. 
More on that  separately.
 
Regards,
 
Rick
 
 
 
 

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