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

[Cathy Marshall]

Hi Rick and others,

Ah, I can't resist chiming in with one last thought.

I can't say too much about product plans on the record (you can imagine why!), except that I have been working with two different product groups inside Microsoft, trying to push some of these ideas forward. I'm hoping one or both teams will offer a product with a distributed architecture oriented toward personal archiving rather than just backup. These products would be consumer-oriented, and would be based on different assumptions than the typical records management products. But who knows-unfortunately it's sometimes easier to make a technical case or needs case than it is to make a business case. I do think that there are a significant number of smart product folks who understand the problem and who have real quantitative data about its scope (for consumers).

I agree that MyLifeBits is more about record capture and about imagining what such a recorded life would be like; MLB is less concerned with pragmatic issues of why people store what they store and where they put it, and it's also less hung up on matters of stewardship (which I tend to think of as the deal breaker for some approaches-often I see technical solutions proposed that simply elide any notion of agency-who does this stuff?). So the projects have very different emphases and come at personal archiving from very different starting points. As you would imagine, I enjoy talking with Gordon, and it's helpful to chat about some of our points of disagreement and what they are based on. (For example, Gordon has always assumed that you keep 'everything' and I've always assumed that most people would be very upset with a life so literally captured and immutable. But Gordon's looking to build a memory prosthesis, and with that in mind, discarding can seem dangerous, because it makes irrecoverable holes in context.)

Teasing out these underlying assumptions is helpful though, and I'm sure we'll continue to do so.

Thanks again everyone for allowing me to participate in such a thoughtful discussion. I've really enjoyed it!

best,
Cathy


From: RICKBARRY at aol.com [mailto:RICKBARRY at aol.com]
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 2:05 PM
To: personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu; Cathy Marshall
Subject: Re: [Personal_archives] distinctions among user types and benign neglect as s...


PRODUCT

As noted in my last em, some years ago, I've been interested in following the development of real products for personal recordkeeping. Among the links on the mybestdocs Pers Erecs page are some to Microsoft's MyLifeBits project, which caught my interest some years ago. After a couple of very interesting discussions with MS principal researcher Gordon Bell (I'm sure a colleague very well known to Cathy's), I didn't see any signs of a product in the near future, which I thought/think is much needed. While the latest thing I've seen on MyLifeBits (prior to reading Cathy's references to it in her D-Lib papers) is the excellent piece in the May 07 Scientific American (and the interesting comments on it in the SciAm as well as in a just prior critique of it on Nate Anderson's ArsTechnica Open Forum and the (sometimes amusing) responses to that). My conclusion was that we weren't going to see a product very soon and that, although the MyBits lit does make reference to capturing everything including personal records, I get the idea that it is a recordmaking but not recordkeeping system and see no evidence that it plans to be; rather it appears to be more like a typically research oriented university institutional repository that has little if any serious recordkeeping functionality, a la 5015.2, MoReq, etc. Perhaps now, or later on, Cathy can share her views on the relationship between her's and the MyLifeBits project and where she sees any forthcoming product in the offing by Microsoft or the competition.

The second of the first 2 products (behind the Canadian Provenance System) to be certified as 5015 compliant in '96 was an Australian system, the Tower Software Company's (disclosure: a former client)  TRIM system for enterprise recordkeeping. I raised the issue of personal records with the then managing director who informed me that Tower did have a personal recordkeeping product but didn't sell well. My personal view was that it was a lite version of the powerful enterprise system rather than a bottom-up design for personal RK. And it was never seriously promoted in my view. TRIM was also originally designed as a recordkeeping product, not in the then-EDM space. Thus, while it (and Provenance) gained quick attention in the federal gov when NARA endorsed 5015 for use by federal agencies, it got the attention of few others, and archivists and records managers were not sufficiently effective or at least successful in getting their own management to buy into them in the US until it showed up on the 5015 list of certified products. CIOs wanted enterprise systems in the EDMS and later ECMS spaces. It totally caught the mighty US technology firms off base -- what's this records management business all about? Don't we do that?  It took a couple of years for some of them to catch up and more for others to begin to understand that records management was a quite rigorous form of information management with correspondingly more rigorous functional and technical requirements that their EDM products didn't support. As it turned out, most of them didn't do well with incorporating RK fixes to their own EDM/ECM products and after trying their hands at it, they finally simply acquired specialized ERK companies and their products, I believe with the exception of FileNet that built its RK product from the bottom up to meet not just RK compliance needs but also industry-specific needs -- food, pharmaceuticals, financial (SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley), etc.  Filenet was as you know acquired by IBM. With the noted exception, how well the old giants have succeeded in integrating other people's software into their ECM systems, I'm not so sure.

I think that there is a likely growing need for products that support different kinds of users, taking account of the demographics noted in my earlier em that

-- actually make it easy and relatively transparent at the information level to the end user
-- that helps the user on the media side with the cloud
-- steers the user to building or massaging a provided taxonomy of personal business processes or personal functions with as invisible and simple as possible macroappraisal criteria and tools to separate the stuff "for the kids", for my collections, for my finances, for other stuff for the kids", etc.

Perhaps another time.

Regards,

Rick


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