Margot Note's Blog, page 15

Archives Assessment Questions

An accurate assessment of archival collections assists organizations in strategically meeting user needs, allocating resources effectively, and securing funding. Simply put, archivists cannot manage collections if they do not know what they are managing.

An Eagle’s View

The assessment of an archives program—or the pieces of a potential program that may be transitioning into a more formal program—encompasses the establishment and alignment of performance expectations, policy review, discussion on strengths and opportunities, and discourse on enhancing archival competencies. When performing an assessment, archivists should review, advise, and suggest updates on documents related to the archives, including policies and procedures, finding aids, past evaluations, grant proposals, and marketing materials.

Because archival work requires granularity, it is easy for archivists to get caught up in the unique details of each collection. However, to perform archival alchemy—that is, changing chaotic files into cohesive collections—archivists need to have a bird’s eye view of the cultural heritage materials they are responsible for.

Querying the Organization

Asking common questions ensures that the organization comprehensively gathers information and maximizes meeting times with archival members to synthesize findings. Therefore, archivists should use the following questions to conduct a survey that will constitute a preliminary archives assessment:

What materials are present?

What formats do they have?

Who created the materials?

What are their quantities—records boxes, shelves, filing cabinets, storage sizes?

What are their conditions?

Who currently stewards these materials, and why? Who has stewarded them in the past?

What materials are missing, and why?

How are the materials stored?

What records are located off-site?

What databases or other inventory systems are in use?

How are materials maintained?

What filing and labeling systems does the organization use? Are they uniform or unique by department?

Are there specific servers dedicated to the archives or electronic backups? Who maintains them?

Are there regularly scheduled purges? Who determines timing and materials?

What records management practices exist?

Who regulates and enforces these practices?

Is there a retention schedule? Can it be amended to include archives?

How are the legal concerns of the materials managed?

Are there privacy or security concerns?

Does the organization own the materials it keeps? If not, who does?

Are licensing processes and rights for the holdings outlined?

Is there documentation of deeds, gifts, or other donation materials?

What environmental factors affect the materials?

Is the preservation of any materials threatened?

What materials need preservation?

What resources are in place to arrange for conservation?

What supplies are used or needed to store materials?

What are the space limitations?

What short-term goals have colleagues articulated for the archives?

What long-term goals do the archives have?

What stakeholders are interested in the materials?

Are the materials publicly available, in part or whole?

Putting it All Together

By asking these questions, the archivist can evaluate the collections’ preservation issues, including environmental monitoring, lighting, security, and fire protection in the exhibition and storage spaces. In time, the archivist can develop detailed plans for improving storage and reducing the damage to collections. In addition, they can assess the conservation treatment needs of selected items in a collection and identify archival supplies to protect the collections. Finally, as well as evaluating the analog collections, they can recommend best practices for digitized and born-digital materials and digital preservation.

The assessment will describe the status of the archives and address their needs. An action plan with recommendations for short-term improvement and long-range vision can be used as a dynamic planning tool. By asking questions to better understand an organization’s archival management, the institution can make strategic choices about how it would like to move forward on the preservation path.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Assessing the Archives Program

Only a fraction of an organization’s records finds their way into the archives. Archives hold non-current records with permanent historical value.

They are no longer needed during day-to-day institutional activities, but they document organizational history. Just as each organization is unique, its archives are equally distinctive. Professional archival principles and standards have been developed over decades of archival practice. However, each organization will adhere to them in its own way.

Archival Principles

Archival principles include respect des fonds and original order. The principle of respect des fonds states that records of different origins, known as provenance, be kept separate to preserve their context. For example, suppose the correspondence of the CEO is filed in her office before it is archived. In that case, the correspondence should not be interfiled with the COO’s papers once those records are transferred to the archives. The principle of original order determines that the organization and sequence of records established by the creator of the records be maintained. As an archivist begins to survey their organization’s records and decide which belong in their archives and how they are organized, these principles will help preserve history, especially when the creators of the records are no longer active or alive. If archivists cannot determine the provenance or original order, they should organize the records so that they are easily searchable, such as alphabetically or chronologically.

Assessing Archives

Before creating an archives, an organization should conduct an archival assessment. During this process, the archivist meets individually or in groups with members of each department to become more familiar with the institution’s history, activities, and programs and further explore how the staff envisions the archives being used. An organizational chart is often helpful to guide these discussions as the creation and use of records and their types and formats relate to the organization’s structure.

The archivist will also survey what materials are currently kept and how they are housed. The investigator will discuss space, staffing, and support. The issue of how digital records, both born-digital and digitally reformatted, are stored should be addressed by all staff, especially those in the IT department.

Many archival assessments reveal that to establish the archives, the organization must formalize its record creation and retention processes and create and use a records retention schedule. An assessment will not only preserve records but can also improve current workflows and future efficiencies.

Following the preliminary assessment, the archivist prepares an assessment report for the institution that details the assessment findings and outlines a plan for moving forward. The report includes goals, including locating, preserving, and making accessible significant historical records. It may also develop preliminary record retention schedules and records management policies for archival and non-archival documents to manage the materials better. If the organization has an upcoming anniversary or other events they would like to use archived records, deadlines and goals for the events will be discussed. The report also addresses the archival program’s scalability and preservation issues.

A Comprehensive Survey

Once the organization has consulted with an archivist, conducted a preliminary assessment, reviewed recommendations, and committed to establishing an archival program, the archivist’s next steps could entail a comprehensive survey of current holdings. The preliminary assessment’s initial records survey may suffice if the organization is small. However, suppose the company is large or old. In that case, a more comprehensive survey may be in order and is required for specific preservation grants. During the survey process, the archivist works closely with the archives committee to review and make notes of existing records and their locations.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Building Support for Archival Programs

Founding an archives program takes knowledge and skill. To be successful, archivists also need to wield their political savvy and institutional advocacy. Building support for archival management requires buy-in from executives and employees.

Creating Buy-in

The first step in establishing an archives program is identifying internal stakeholders who will benefit from the archives, such as people in leadership, board members, and staff members, and external stakeholders like researchers and students. Archivists should also enlist record creators who create, support, and document institutional activities. For many employees, preserving history is not an immediate need. Employees may be overwhelmed with their activities without much foresight and decision-making about how to protect their work in the future.

Institutions create their legacy by connecting with mission statements, publications, and websites. Ideally, that history should be recorded in written or oral records, not just reside in the institutional memory embodied in long-term employees. Even the youngest organization has a history: the vision of the founders and the reasons behind programs and projects that can help define an archival collection and set policies for retaining materials. The history should include a chronology of the company and factor in significant changes in management and mission.

Archivists should articulate how an archives program relates to the organization’s vision and how the archives will support day-to-day operations. Archiving should not be seen as an activity to do someday but as an endeavor directly tied to organizational benefits, culture, and history.

Forming a Steering Committee

Archivists should enlist executives and interested board members in a steering committee to help draft a mission statement for the archives program. The archives’ mission should tie into the organization’s vision with a clear purpose. Guiding resources to future archival activities will be easier to achieve with leaders having personal buy-in to its success and engaging in the archival program initiation.

After the steering committee discusses and drafts an archives mission statement, stakeholders should contribute to the project’s design since the archives should reflect the institution’s activities. Communicating how an archives project will serve each stakeholder’s interest is critical. For example, board members may be interested in the organization’s long-term impact. Directors may be more concerned with the legacy of the work and the people who created it. Managers may be most interested in how an archives project will help increase labor and economic efficiency. The marketing department is concerned with stories they can share with the community. The facilities manager may want to clear spaces and open more room for other activities.

360° Engagement

Top-down success strategies may include reporting archival activity directly to an executive director, attending board meetings, and forming a board committee, which help guarantee that the archival program remains aligned with organizational goals. Consider the archives’ annual operating and project budgets. No matter the scale of the archives, it is easier to attract outside funding and support when the archives are incorporated into institutional planning. A conservative budget line item for a sustainable archives program is a better measure of long-term viability than a capital project for the archives that loses momentum after its establishment.

Archivists may need to employ bottom-up strategies to build support among the stakeholders who carry out day-to-day work. For example, the archives can serve marketing and development staff by offering access to historical information, records, and artifacts that support narratives. Vital institutional archives provide research services for users within the organization, making materials available easily. Staff members should be shown how contributing to the archives can save time, streamline workflows, document work processes, and preserve the historical record.

No matter the archival program’s shape, archivists should enlist all possible stakeholders’ input at its inception to build a foundation for long-term success.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

9 Ways to Verify Primary Source Reliability

To produce sound historical research, we need reliable primary sources. Records created at the same time as an event, or as close as possible to it, usually have a greater chance of being accurate than records created years later, especially by someone without firsthand knowledge of the event. When you are conducting research, you want to corroborate the contents of the document you are working with with information from other sources that have been proven to be legitimate.

While this post concerns written sources, one must remember that these questions can also be posed to other types of primary sources. I always advise my students to consider non-textual sources. For example, photographs have captured information about groups of people that the traditional archival record has not. (The development of visual literacy poses its own challenges, which I may explore in future posts).

Interrogate the sources you use. Consider two aspects of reliability. One is the record itself. The other is that each source contains individual pieces of evidence to be considered as well.  You may not be able to answer all the questions below. However, by what you can answer, you may be able to determine whether you can accept the information as truthful.      

Was the source created at the same time of the event it describes? If not, who made the record, when, and why?

Who furnished the information? Was the informant in a position to give correct facts? Was the informant a participant in the original event? Was the informant using secondhand information? Would the informant have benefited from giving incorrect or incomplete answers?

Is the information in the record such as names, dates, places, events, and relationships logical? Does it make sense in the context of time, place, and the people being researched?

Does more than one reliable source give the same information?

What other evidence supports the information in the source?

Does the source contain discrepancies? Were these errors of the creator of the document or the informant?

Have you found any reliable evidence that contradicts or conflicts with what you already know?

Is the source an original or a copy? If it’s a copy, can you get a version closer to the original?

Does the document have characteristics that may affect is readability? Consider smears, tears, missing words, faded ink, hard-to-read handwriting, too dark microfilm, and bad reproduction.

In a world of “fake news,” we all have to be mindful about the information we consume. Historical records are no different. Some sources may be considered more reliable than others, but every source is biased in some way. Because of this, historians read skeptically and cross-check sources against other evidence. Being a critical thinker who analyzes primary sources creates quality scholarship and a more accurate historical record.

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Here are some of my favorite books on the subject:

Five Questions to Ask When Using Primary Sources

Primary sources are the materials that historians use and archivists preserve. Primary sources serve as evidence for the interpretation of past events. Analyzing primary sources will help you to understand how an argument has been constructed and to adopt a more critical stance towards the books and articles that you encounter.

Reading an original document or describing an image is daunting, especially when it is historical and originates from a period when attitudes, values, and modes of expression were different from our own.

The most important principle to remember when using primary sources is that they cannot be taken at face value. They have to be interrogated. A series of questions have to be asked of any primary source before we can begin to decide what it can tell us about the historical subject we are addressing. These five questions are:

What is it?

First, consider what kind of primary source document you have. Is it a letter, a newspaper clipping, or a report? Is it a photograph? What technology was used to create it? No matter what kind of document you are dealing with, be as specific as possible about what it is. You must understand the type of historical record it is to proceed to the next set of questions.

Who made it?

Consider its authorship. Who wrote, published, photographed, recorded, or otherwise made the document? Sometimes this is straightforward, such as with a letter. The creator is the person who signed it.

It can be more complicated than this. Who was the person who wrote the letter? What do you know about their position in regards to the events you are researching? If it is a famous person, answering this secondary question may be easy. But if the person was not well-known, you may have to get clues by doing further research.

When and where was it created?

Figure out when a document was created. It is important to be able to place the creation of the document on a timeline in relation to the events you are researching.

Knowing the place a document was created is another aspect of understanding its context. Try to figure out, with as much specifically as possible, where it was created.

What does it tell you? What does it not tell you?

Once you have tried to determine what the document is, who its creator was, and the time and place of its creation, examine what the document might tell you about the topic you are researching.

If it is a written or audio document:

Read through or listen to the document. What does it say? What information does it provide that you did not know before? Pay attention to what you do not understand or recognize, such as the terms, people, places, and events that are mentioned.

If it is a picture or moving image:

Examine it. What is represented? If there are people in the picture, what are they doing? Are they posing for the picture? What is the relationship between the artist or photographer and the subject? What places, buildings, natural surroundings, signs, or other objects are in the picture? What was going on when the picture was created? Note what you do not recognize such as buildings, objects, or people.

The questions raised during this process will guide the background research needed to understand the document better.

Why was it created?

Try to determine the message the document was conveying in its particular time and context. What audience was the creator trying to reach? For what purpose?

What do you know about this audience or reader, and how may they have understood the document? Consider the point of view of the creators. What was their stake in making the document?

No research project relies on a single source. You will need to examine related documents in the same record series to get more information that will help to put your document in context. If you are doing your research right, these five initial questions will lead to many more queries.

Developing analytical skills through primary source interrogation will enable you to appreciate the complexity of historical knowledge, the fragmentary character of the sources from which it is derived, and the provisional and uncertain character of historical explanation.

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Here’s a collection of my favorite primary source books:

Preserving Organizational History

Every organization has a history; ideally, institutions should organize and preserve their records for the future. Written records are often the only source of information about an institution’s early intentions and activities, and these documents provide institutional knowledge about the organization’s establishment, by whom, and what programs and activities it created. 

Organized, accessible records provide information for decision-making. In addition, the documentation offers an institutional memory to resolve legal disputes; facilitates accountability to clients, parent organizations, or regulatory bodies; saves time, effort, and money; assists in planning for anniversaries or special events; instills pride in the past; and inspires hope for the future. Archival records can also recognize long-term employees and measure the organization’s growth and development.

Identifying Records of Enduring Value

Whether the organization has a formal archives program or not, knowing which records have enduring value helps the future of the archives. Keeping an organization’s documents consists of sorting and organizing, eliminating duplicates and temporary or non-essential records, and creating policies and procedures to preserve records.

Records of lasting value may include:

Charters, constitutions, and bylaws with amendments and revisions

Meeting minutes, agendas, and supporting documents

Procedures manuals and handbooks

Organizational histories

Interviews with founding members, past presidents, and board members

Biographies of past and present executives

Board files

Rosters of trustees, officers, and committee chairs

Program files

General ledgers, journals, budgets, and financial records

Contracts, insurance policies, and legal documents

Deeds, surveys, architectural drawings, and building and property records

Important correspondence

Program files

Reports

Photographs

Audiovisual materials

Clippings, press releases, or articles

Artifacts such as event materials

Awards, memorials, and citations

Publications such as bulletins, brochures, and newsletters (For publications with many copies, keeping three copies each is sufficient).

Organizations need to retain certain records beyond their current use needs according to regulatory, legal, financial, and operational requirements, as well as federal and state laws. There are several choices an organization can make to preserve its records. For example, it can create and maintain its archives and donate records to an existing archival repository or the archives of a parent organization. 

An organization should assign someone the responsibility to systematically maintain its current records and preserve those with historical significance. An organization may include a statement about the importance of maintaining historical records in its constitution or bylaws. The responsibilities usually fall to the organization’s archivist. These responsibilities include:

developing record-keeping policies and procedures

selecting the appropriate storage space for the records

sorting and organizing the records

describing records

requesting permanent copies of frequently updated records

following records management guidelines

Sometimes these record-keeping duties fall to interns, junior employees, or other non-professionals. Unfortunately, using unskilled but well-meaning archival labor can cause problems in the long term. Therefore, organizations should always invest in archivists. 

Why Preserve?

The preservation of an organization’s records should not be done only for the convenience of historians, even though this purpose most relates to benefiting the larger community. Instead, the preservation of the materials is essential for each organization. In addition, preserved resources allow users interested in an organization to trace its history. 

History gives people a sense of identity, defining who they are and where they have been. An essential part of their identity is the organizations in which they interact. Institutions and their organizational history are a product of past experiences, which become the basis for shared memory. 

Records are the material expression of an organization’s interests; within the context of those interests, an original record impartially chronicles an event. While people may interpret records differently, the information contained in the records remains constant. Preserving primary sources allows for an accurate historical legacy. 

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Deciding Records Retention Parameters: A Primer

Record retention is either date-driven or event-driven.

For date-driven retention, disposition takes place based on the date of the document. For example, email messages are deleted when they are 60 days old, correspondence files are destroyed when they are five years old, or records of the president of the university are offered to the archives when they are 15 years old. For event-driven retention, disposition is based on an event that starts the retention clock ticking. For example, an employee’s personnel file is destroyed 56 years after retirement, records of the president of the university are offered to the archives 15 years after the president leaves office, or contract records will be destroyed seven years after contract closeout.

Both types of retention are simple in concept but more complex in real-life implementation. In the case of date-driven retentions, records are usually dispositioned in annual blocks. In the example of the correspondence files where the records are destroyed when they are five years old, all the records from 2016 will be destroyed in 2022: a full five years after the last one was created. In the case of event-driven disposition, all the records of cases that were closed in a specific year are retired together for common disposition, no matter what year they began. In the example of contract records to be destroyed seven years after contract closeout, all contracts closed out in 2020 would be managed as a group and destroyed in 2028, no matter when the contracts started.

Date-driven retentions are the norm for correspondence files, subject files, accounting and budget files, and most management and administrative files. Event-driven retentions are more common for various case files and records of projects or other activities that span several years. However, those are not fixed rules, but guidelines adapted to specific circumstances. Automated systems, such as email, can deal better with date-driven retentions than event-driven ones. Deleting all emails over 60 days old is easy. However, deleting all emails relating to a specific contract seven years (or even 60 days) after closeout takes specific capabilities available only in records management applications.

External Statutory, Regulatory, and Legal Requirements

In archival circles, these requirements have been pulled together under the term literary warrant. The term became popular in the early 1990s and was developed originally during the Pittsburgh Project led by Richard Cox and David Bearman. The concept is simple: what is the written (regulatory or legal) requirement for maintaining records? Regulatory requirements are easy to identify, except that there are so many of them. For example, retention requirements are issued by federal, state, and local jurisdictions in the United States, and foreign governments have their own that multinational organizations are subject to. Often these can be in conflict. An additional layer of external requirements may stem from contracts of other legal agreements.

Organizations get legal assistance in developing records retention policies. Such assistance can be obtained with contracts or software that includes legal retention requirements. Once identified, these requirements are accepted as defining the minimum retention periods, although longer retentions may be selected. Most organizations would consider the risks of non-compliance too great.

Internal Legal, Fiscal, and Administrative Organizational Needs

The second factor in determining retentions is less clear than the first. In some cases (legal or fiscal, for example), the external requirements may determine the internal requirements for related records. For example, for organizations that perform work under contract with the federal government, the government would set standards for records retention of certain documentation relating to contract fulfillment.

It becomes more difficult to determine retention when there are no external requirements to consider in establishing retention requirements. For example, how long does one keep correspondence files of a division director of an organization? The process for determining retention may involve identifying the reasons that records need to be maintained, such as a need to plan for budgets, manage the program, or preserve corporate memory, and determining an appropriate retention period. Rules of thumb may include the number of years in a budget cycle, the product’s life, or audit cycles. Sometimes it comes down to what decision-makers are comfortable with. Usually, the records manager will conduct an analysis, discuss the retention needs with various stakeholders and then recommend a retention period. The stakeholders (including the general counsel) will approve the retention to meet internal needs.

Standards of Practice and Community Expectations

One of the things that records managers look for in determining retentions is what similar organizations do with similar records. There is a good bit of sharing among federal agencies, many of whom put their schedules online. The same is true for industry groups, especially those that are heavily regulated, such as the nuclear, petroleum, pharmaceutical, and power industries. Several have their own records management groups, where records managers share common practices and approaches to records management. One of the benchmarks for determining whether a retention period is realistic is how similar organizations manage the records.

The practices need not be mandatory for an organization’s business area to be accepted as a standard of practice. For example, the mandatory three-year retention of pertinent emails under Sarbanes-Oxley applies only to financial and auditing institutions, but other organizations use the three-year rule as their benchmark for retaining business-related emails.

Finally, there are community expectations. For example, when someone purchases a new computer, they may receive a one-year manufacturer’s warranty. They register their purchase with the manufacturer with an expectation that the manufacturer will retain that registration information so that they can honor any claims need. That is straightforward. However, do they have any right to expect the company to retain records about problems they fixed under warranty once the warranty expires? Of course, the company may decide that they want to keep that information to track computer problems, but that would be an administrative and research use decision.

Archivists, records managers, and other organizational stakeholders determine records retention—and the ultimate destruction or preservation of records—based on compliance with external statutory, regulatory, and legal requirements; internal legal, fiscal, and administrative organizational needs; and standards of practice (both mandatory and voluntary) and identifiable community expectations.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Records and Archival Management within Organizations

Managing an organization’s current records is records management, and maintaining records of enduring value is archives management. 

Organizing Current Records

Records managers identify and classify an organization’s records, monitor their use and storage, and facilitate access. Records policies outline the records management program’s authority, particularly legal mandates governing record creation and maintenance for administrative, legal, and fiscal purposes. 

The lifecycle of an organization’s records, including creation, retention, and disposition instructions, is articulated in a records retention schedule. This document assigns responsibility for creating records and supports their disposition, or the length of time the organization retains records, whether temporary or permanent.

Employees complete business activities using current administrative, legal, and fiscal records. Records become inactive once they have fulfilled the original purpose of their creation; in many circumstances, the window of activity may be three years. Employees, guided by the records management department, retain their files for certain periods per their records retention schedule. 

Managing Permanent Records

It is unnecessary, risky, and expensive to keep all records permanently. However, some records are inherent to an organization’s fiscal, legal, and intellectual viability, and the preservation of their heritage and an archives should permanently keep them. 

The purpose of an archival repository is to preserve and make accessible records of enduring value. Many organizations establish archives programs to leverage their history as their most unique asset, which sets them apart from competitors. Archival materials directly result from an institution’s functions, offering a tribute to its core values, making accessible corporate memory, and preserving information to shape its future. Since every organization has a history, the benefits of a successful archival program are independent of size, age, prestige, and industry.

Types of Enduring Organizational Records

The archival records create its story. Materials created during business document an organization’s founding, growth, and change, define its structure, and display its accomplishments. Records come in all media: paper, digital files, audiovisual recordings, photographs, prints, and other formats used for recording and accessing information. Many organizations have historical documents, no matter their size or scope. They include a charter or articles of incorporation related to its founding, a constitution and bylaws regarding organizational purpose and structure, meeting minutes, financial records, bulletins, newsletters, programs, and publications, newspaper clippings, photographs, and sound and video recordings documenting organizational history. Archivists also include employee and payroll records, building plans, strategy documents, and other information in their repository.

Organizations also contend with processing and maintaining digital materials collections while preserving the records’ value, integrity, and context. Principles of archival practice consider the lifecycle of records, their organic nature, the hierarchy in records, and their description. They also consider the sanctity of evidence, such as the ability for records to provide insight into the activities and events leading to their creation. Archivists review the respect des fonds, or their grouping according to the nature of the institution that accumulated them, provenance, and original order. 

Archival Benefits

An archival program returns its investment to the organization that hosts it. Like other resources provided by institutions, archival materials serve as assets to help organizations:

Reduce operating costs

Establish business continuity

Centralize and improve the efficiency of information

Support the legal and compliance departments

Contribute to a sound risk management program

Communicate stability in times of change

Maximize the organization’s brand and reputation

Provide marketing and public relations content

Strengthen employee and client loyalty

Preserve corporate memory and organizational heritage

Conduct business intelligence services

Track philanthropic activities over time

A well-organized archival program allows archivists to identify, save, and retrieve the necessary information while safely removing unnecessary material. Maintaining institutional knowledge through an archives program gives organizations a competitive edge.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Leading with Organizational Archives

Most people in leadership positions focus on the present and the future. When conversation turns to an organization’s history, it is usually in connection with milestones such as anniversaries or leadership transitions.

A quickly changing world has no time for winsome nostalgia. However, people who lead with history understand that storytelling about the past can be a tool for shaping the future.

Leaders can devise strategies for the future by harnessing organizational history. Iconoclasts, innovations, and impact inform the organization and what it wishes to become. Communicating an organization’s history instills a sense of identity and purpose as a leader strives to engage people collectively. Leaders who understand the power of archives use history to advocate for change and motivate people to overcome challenges. It acts as a problem-solving tool that offers insights and meaningful perspectives.

History as Identity

A shared history imbues a group identity among individuals, which is needed now more than ever with remote teams. A narrative about the organization helps people understand what is happening around them and guides them in their decision-making. When they know their organization’s history, employees may see events as something larger than themselves.

Discovering and studying the history of an institution entails the ability to explain events as a flow or process over time, not just a sequence of isolated happenings. It allows people to approach the past with a sense of curiosity. People who value institutional memory perceive the past on its terms and in ways comprehensible to people of the time. People often cannot help but distort the past through the lens of their experiences, ideas, and values. Avoiding “presentism” helps us understand past decisions. Most importantly, valuing organizational history allows for understanding events in their contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic contexts.

Necessary Change

History also transforms organizational culture. Change is challenging for people to embrace in their personal lives, let alone their professional ones. Leaders can look beyond today’s stories to reach for other ones. Leaders can use their history to explain necessary changes and actions to adapt to a new way of doing things.

Engaging with History

Consider some ideas for engaging with history at an organization. Employees can survey the organization’s history. This information will help leaders understand how history shapes beliefs about the institution today and fill in missing pieces that should be addressed. An organization can also make it a routine to interview departing, long-tenured employees. Such interviews often provide a history not covered in the written record. Departments like marketing and publicity can make the organization’s history accessible. They can capture stories about the organization’s work and use them for marketing, publications, and social media. The organization should document lessons learned as part of the workflow for significant projects and initiatives. Recognize that one can discover as much from failure as from success. The documentation can also help employees seek a historical perspective from the organization’s past before major decisions. Most importantly, organizations should have an archives program, no matter how small. Understanding institutional history requires access to important documents, images, and artifacts.

The Power of the Past

Leading with history acknowledges its power. An organization’s culture, capabilities, development, and interactions with external forces shape leaders’ choices and influence how people think about the future.

Great leaders see history in their everyday activities, not just for milestone anniversaries. They think about the present in terms of its past and view their organization’s experiences as a part of their thinking towards change. They find a rich source of stories that characterize their organizations to motivate employees to embrace change. Doing so allows them to manage their organizations more effectively and find their place in history.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact

Email Management and Archiving

Email remains the poster child for electronic records (mis)management, and with good reason. Many sources cite that 75% of all office work flows through email, and more recent figures put the figure at over 80%. 

Why should archivists and records managers be concerned with email? There are several good reasons. The first is retrieval. A significant percentage of an organization’s unstructured records pass through email. It may not be a recordkeeping system, but it acts similarly to central files in the past. In addition, people keep emails in part for reference. Another reason, on the opposite side of the spectrum, is legal. Organizations are sensitive that email often contains “smoking guns” and wish to eliminate email quickly. A third reason is IT issues; email takes a large amount of work to manage the volume of emails during business. The last reason is the separation of wheat and chaff. In other words, a major problem with email is that while it contains much important material, much of it is duplicative and of limited, short-term value. 

Organizations need to balance risk. Do they keep too much or keep too little? One approach for email retention is based on a couple of hypotheses. First, no solution will work if it asks employees to change how they work. Email management must be transparent to the user. 

Most emails could be considered a record, but most do not merit long-term retention, even if their content is not duplicated elsewhere. Most are working files: useful to the employee to perform his or her duties but not of value to the organization itself or for the historical record.

Recent court cases and calls for government transparency have resulted in a gradual shift toward expecting emails to be kept. The community sees short-term retention (e.g., 60-90 days) as indicative that the organization has something to hide. This perception will continue to grow. Not that all emails need to be kept forever, but they need to be kept for a reasonable amount of time to allow for oversight.

Four Main Categories

Most email systems have four main categories of records. The first is the transmission of important final documents; however, they appear in other files somewhere. The second category is directions, instructions, and decisions. These directives may have long-term importance, such as hiring an employee, or short-term, such as granting paid time off. These decisions may or may not be documented in other files in other means. A third factor is discussion threads about any topic that may or may not lead to a decision. These may or may not be documented in other files. The final category is miscellaneous notifications and dissemination of information. 

An email archiving application would be able to perform de-duplication of email messages, provide disposition functionality and search capability, and be able to tag some messages for special handling.

A Reasonable Solution

A solution for email archiving would be in three parts.

Designate individual employees as “stewards” for the records of various aspects of their work. They are not asked to manage their email but to manage the documentation of the business transactions for which they are stewards. If a person is a steward, that should be included in their performance plan, and their recordkeeping practices should be evaluated as part of their performance review.

Set clear standards on what needs to be kept as part of the files and provide guidance in gray areas, either when in doubt, keep it, or keep only what is necessary to document what happened (not why it happened). Note that the same guidance need not be given to the stewards of the records of all business processes. For example, purchasing may give one set of instructions and policy development of dispute resolution another. These standards are based on what employees want to maintain as the business process records. 

If someone is not a steward, they can keep copies of their emails and other documents, but they are not required. If asked, they should be expected to locate relevant documentation, but they would be free to maintain it as they wish. This license to manage would be bounded in some way, either by the length of time (e.g., documents not opened in a number of months or years, get deleted) or by volume (e.g., one gig of storage to use wisely). 

Technology can be applied, with retention focused on individuals and offices with especially important or sensitive work. It would also allow for de-duplication, saving storage costs. While email is poorly managed in most organizations, that does not prove that the basic transactions of the organization are not being managed as well. Give the records stewards the tools to do their job and hold them accountable. That is how records management started, and that is where it will be successful. 

The solution is not foolproof, but it resolves some email archiving challenges. Some organizations will have more pressing business needs and set tighter restrictions. This approach is good enough for most organizations and can serve as a foundation for improvement.

The blog was originally published on Lucidea's blog. 

Get Started

Looking for archival advising, records management, and historical research services? Click below to speak with an expert consultant.

Contact