Guest post by Melissa Lasko, Development and Alumni Engagement, Awards

Rhiannon Wallace, Melissa Lasko, Devon Farrell (2020/21 Work Learn student), Barbara Towell (not pictured)
The Development and Alumni Engagement (DAE) Awards team has a long history of creating physical files for storing donor information. As these files accumulated over the years, the Awards team began to wonder new physical files needed to be created, or if it was possible to store everything digitally and do away with physical files. In addition, the Awards team was growing. With new staff members joining the team the question of how best to share files and manage file versioning became important. In the summer of 2019, the team contacted the Records Management Office to help answer these questions.
Barbara Towell, e-Records Manager and Arika Keneko, a student with the School of Information, reviewed the Awards teams practices. At the outset of the project, Barbara explained that as long as digitization procedures were documented and in alignment with UBC’s Digitization Standard, creating physical files was no longer necessary. In terms of team efficiency, this was exciting and welcome news! Being alleviated of the responsibility of creating physical files and updating them as new documents were produced would save the team tens of hours each month that could be put towards other projects. But in our experience DAE’s digital files with long filenames did sometimes become corrupted and we could not chance an important file becoming unusable. The file corruption that the team experienced sporadically could be managed, we learned, through implementing a file and folder naming convention.
The naming convention ensures that the team has a shared understanding of which file is the most updated version which is crucial when the team is preparing legal documents related to the establishment of endowed awards.
A naming convention for documents was developed and implemented for all files related to the award establishment process which make up 80% of the team’s file creation. The naming convention ensures that the team has a shared understanding of which file is the most updated version which is crucial when the team is preparing legal documents related to the establishment of endowed awards. These documents need to be reviewed by University Counsel and then signed by the donor and President. The team needed to ensure that these documents would be correct and minimize the chances that an outdated document or a document that hadn’t properly gone through the full review process would be shared with the donor. A shared naming convention allows the team to work on files interchangeably if members were on vacation and share documents with multiple units across the University for feedback during the review process.
The team members’ concerns around files being renamed never materialized
Initially the team had reservations about sharing documents with a DAE-specific naming convention and worried that colleagues outside the department would rename files to something more familiar to them. As part of the implementation of the new process, Barbara and Arika hosted a training session to demonstrate the new naming conventions with practice examples which helped to address the team’s fears. A job aid was created for team member’s reference.
The team members’ concerns around files being renamed never materialized. The team has managed to adhere to the naming convention and files are shared without confusion with multiple individuals collaborating on one award description within the team and across the larger University thanks to the guidance of the Records Management Office and through the hand-on help from the iSchool students.
Over the summer of 2020 the Records Management Office continued to assist the Awards team with their filing challenges and enlisted the help of iSchool student, Rhiannon Wallace to pick up where Arika left off with implementing structural changes to the DAE file share. It was an exciting process that I will let her tell you about here.