Guest Post by: Elizabeth Kukely, Communications and Learning Administrator, Financial Operations
“The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation” The Clock of the Long Now
Elizabeth Kukely, Communications and Learning Administrator stands with Danielle Ross, iSchool Student
On March 2016 Financial Operations started a learning journey on digital records management. What’s that you ask? Why do you need to learn about managing digital records? You can just save your documents on a drive, right? Why bother to manage when storage is so cheap and one can get an extra terabyte from IT in no time if you happen to run out.
We successfully managed paper records, so how hard can it be to manage digital records?
So let me ask you this: let’s say you have 3 boxes of documents at your desk. Your colleague beside you also have couple of boxes and then the colleague beside your colleague and so on. A month later you all add probably another 3 boxes of documents then another 3 and by the end of the year you all end up with at least 20+ boxes of documents. Literally, you are all boxed in, surrounded by boxes at your desk. Now, are you all going to ask for a bigger desk space? Or are you going to look through your boxes of documents and archive what needs to be archived for the historical record and shred what is no longer required? We all know the answer when it comes to boxes of documents but somehow when we talk about digital records they are invisible. Many of you probably think that they are taken care of by IT, because IT is the one who manages the drive, right? Wrong. Managing digital information works best when it’s part of a broader governance process.
The university has a duty to care for the future, preserve intellectual heritage and pass it through to the next generation, we do that best by managing the records of the present.
After 3 years of working on this project I think we still have lots to learn but hopefully we are on our way to understand how digital records management, or lack of it, can negatively affect productivity, cost money and degrade the quality of information we need to keep and archive for the future. As the opening quote says, “The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation.” We know we can be better.
We are at phase 3 in our G drive clean-up project. Barbara Towell, e-Records Manager at University Archives says we will have many more phases. I see now that she is right. “The important thing,” says Towell, “is to get started and look forward to improvements.”
Phased Approach to Improvements – Phases I & 2
In 1st phase Dothlyn McFarlane, a student of Master of Library and Information Studies, provided us with an in-depth analysis and a series of recommendations. Then in the 2nd phase we hired someone full time through the Co-op Program to continue on Dothlyn’s findings and develop file structure, implement governance and provide us with unit-level policies and procedures for the management of our electronic records. Kayla Hilstob, also a student from Master of Library and Information Studies, took on this task as a 9 months position and had everything implemented by the end of 2017.
In 2018 we were on our own, happily saving documents on our ‘new’ drive. I say ‘new’ drive, because we moved from the G drive to a partitioned section of the G called X drive. We only took what we needed and left the rest.
Phase 3 – Managing “the Rest”
So, what happened to the stuff on the G drive? Since the records didn’t magically clean themselves up we had to start phase 3. Danielle Ross, another of the many excellent students we have worked with from UBC’s iSchool, bravely got to work in creating a step-by-step procedure to apply and document destructions on the drive. Then she got to work applying this procedure.
After 3 years of working on this project I think we still have lots to learn but hopefully we are on our way to understand how digital records management, or lack of it, can negatively affect productivity, cost money and degrade the quality of information we need to keep and archive for the future
Using the procedure Danielle developed we have deleted over 490,671 files and 3,976 folders equaling close to 40 GB of information being unnecessarily retained from 2012 and before. By the end of phase 3 we will reach the ½ million mark of deleted files. The electronic documents that we kept all this time are unnecessary for business use and increase risk for the university. The documents we create are the property of the University of British Columbia and thus the University is responsible for them. This is one reason we need to manage and destroy documents according to the retention schedule. Each year we will apply the deletion procedure that Danielle created. The chart below demonstrates how much information will be removed from the drive by year.
The other reason we need to manage documents is for the future generations. This is more important now than ever as we are digitizing everything. Even the world economy is now digital. Management and disposition of records is key. Now we have a method to confidently delete unnecessary records from the drive. We know what we have and how long to keep it.
The university has a duty to care for the future, preserve intellectual heritage and pass it through to the next generation, we do that best by managing the records of the present. Everyone at Financial Operations is learning to do their best to manage digital records. We implemented a monthly workshop for new staff on managing electronic records and created a small card with tips on how to name files and folders to stay consistent. In our next phase we will learn how to assign individual responsibilities to folders.
What we have achieved could not have been done without the keen and intelligent students from this university; and, without Barbara Towell from the Records Management office at the University Archives, who patiently holds our hand as we embark on each phase and provides us with invaluable strategy, tactics and guidance as we learn to manage our digital records.
Example of Small Card Elizabeth developed as part of on-boarding helping new staff remember how to name documents
We successfully managed paper records, so how hard can it be to manage digital records?