Email Management Thought for the day. is not a Natural Act The - - PDF document

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Email Management is not a Natural Act

Megan Winget - Co-Project Manager

Managing the Digital University Desktop: Introduction and Preliminary Findings

Thought for the day….

“The end-user manages e-mail.”

• ARMA Guideline for Managing E-

mail

Project Goals - 1

• Document how faculty,

administrators, and staff use and manage files and records from electronic mail and other desktop applications at UNC-CH, Duke University, throughout the 16- campus UNC system, and by extension, across academia..

Project Goals - 2

• Based on the analysis of user needs

and practices, as well as the North Carolina Public Records Act, develop

• ptimized e-mail and desktop

management "best practice" guidelines to serve both public and private higher education in North Carolina and provide an adaptable model of practice for other states.

Project Goals - 3

• Develop educational opportunities

(workshops, FAQs, exercises, web- based courses, etc.) to optimize faculty, administrator, and staff use and management of desktop electronic documents.

Project Goals - 4

• Develop user profiles necessary for a

strategic consideration of electronic records management systems and use these to evaluate the potential appropriateness of ERMSs for the UNC-CH and Duke campuses.

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And…Dissemination

• Disseminate information about the

best practices guidelines and instructional units at UNC, Duke, and across the 16-campus UNC system via a statewide conference and to other universities via the records management/ archival literatures and conferences and the project website.

First Year

• To learn how faculty, staff, and

administrators manage their electronic materials we:

– Conducted campus-wide web surveys at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University. – Interviewed 100 individuals. – Interviewed approximately 25 IT staff.

Second Year

• Developed coding schema for interview

data

• Coded each of the 100 in-depth interviews

looking for consensus on relevant issues.

• Transformed most prevalent concerns

into “Frequently Asked Questions”

• Met with users to review the questions

and answers, seeing if our work was helpful.

Best Answer?

• Helping people become information

management literate.

• Moving people toward better

practice.

• Realizing that telling people to

manage electronic files as “paper” has not been effective.

Web Survey

• 8,334 addresses at UNC.
• 17,327 addresses at Duke.
• 1076 Valid responses at UNC.

About 212 emails bounced.

• 1899 Valid Responses from

Duke: About 1,115 bounced.

Survey Questions

• Email application most often used
• Volume/time spent on email
• Attachments
• Storage practices
• Importance to job
• Specific Concerns
• Willingness to do further interview

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Interview Protocol Development

• Went back to our original goals.

– To understand how individuals manage their digital desktops, both email messages and digital files. – To devise guidelines, aids, and learning models to support improved user behavior.

• What are people doing?
• How can we improve what they are doing

both for their own work and for the university?

Designing the Interviews

• Started with the concerns that surfaced in

the survey returns.

• Generated every possible question we

could devise, in probably as inappropriate forms as we could.

– Pooled our questions. – Used words like, “appraisal,” and “authenticity.”

Developing the Conceptual Framework

• Categorized our questions.
• Because we are exploring how

individuals are functioning as their

• wn records managers and

archivists, we linked our questions to basic archival functions.

Framework for Questions

• Electronic files must undergo

appraisal in order to assess their importance, potential for long-term preservation, and their “recordness.”

• In order to ensure authenticity,

particular actions must happen and particular information must be created and preserved.

Interview Framework

• In order to preserve electronic

records, the digits and their context must be physically secured and preserved.

• Arrangement in a logical file

structure can be useful in making electronic records accessible.

Framework for Study

• In order for electronic records to be

accessible they must be described clearly and adequately. Description can involve indexing, abstracting, and other additional subject analysis

• r simply file naming and titling.

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Framework

• How individuals view ownership of

electronic materials and issues of privacy and security will influence how they handle the items. Thus, we need to ask individuals to whom they believe the messages belong, what rights they have to privacy of the message content, and how secure the messages/email system is.

Appraisal questions

• What criteria do you use to decide to

keep an email message? To delete one?

• What criteria do you use to decide to

keep an electronic document? To delete

• ne?
• Do you think any of the email messages
• r documents that you receive or

produce in the course of your daily work should be preserved for years to come by the university? Why?/Why not?

Authenticity Questions

• How do you save attachments?
• When you save an attachment, do you

save the email message along with it?

• If you store important messages

electronically outside of your email application, does the header information stay with the messages?

Arrangement

• Tell me about your email/file folder

structure that we see here.

• Get print-out of folder structure.
• Would you say that you use a similar

structure in email and file directories?

• Paper file structure?
• Tell us about the file structure on your

hard drive. How have you organized materials?

Description

• How do you determine subject lines you

attach to work-related email messages you send?

• How do you retrieve stored messages if

you need them at a later time?

• How do you name electronic files?
• How do you retrieve your electronic files?

Physical Preservation

• Are your email messages being backed up

automatically?

• Do you explicitly back up your email messages?
• Are your electronic files (documents, images,

etc.) automatically backed up?

• Do you keep copies of all the messages you send?

If so, where/how do you keep these?

• How do you store important messages?

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Privacy & Security

• Is your email yours or the university’s? Other

files on your UNC computer?

• Who owns your email? (Ownership vs.

intellectual property issues with this question)

• Who can [has the ability] to read your email

without your permission? Your electronic files?

• Do you distinguish between "official" and

personal email? Do you manage and store them differently?

• UNC ONLY: Have you heard of the Public

Records law in North Carolina?

Interview Participants

• Goal was to interview a wide cross-

section of faculty, staff, and administrators at both campuses.

• Only selected people who indicated

they wished further involvement after the survey.

Selection Framework

• Tried to apply Samuels’ Varsity Letters

model:

– Confer credentials – Convey knowledge – Foster socialization – Conduct research – Sustain the institution – Provide public service – Promote culture

Samuels’ Model Did Not Work

• We could not break all the individuals we

had from the survey into Samuels’ 7 categories.

• Job titles did not reflect job functions.
• We decided we didn’t know enough about
• ur population to apply a model blindly.
• We would select from faculty and staff

from various departments and administrative units.

Interviews

• We conducted 100 interview during

spring and summer of 2003.

• Most averaged 45 minutes in length

with some over an hour, some briefer.

• One person interviewed; another

took notes in a spreadsheet.

Coding

• Took each interview note session

and coded using NVIVO software.

• Developed codes for each question

and reconciled over entire set of questions.

• Two people coded all the questions.
• Reconciled disparate codes and

coding.

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Exploring the Coded Data

• Next step was to make charts and

tables for as many quantifiable questions as possible.

• Highlight useful and telling

quotations within notes.

• Explore data topically.

Building the Frequently Asked Questions

• Looked at Email handling guidelines.
• Looked at FAQs.
• Looked at our data.
• Designed preliminary FAQs.
• Held focus group of UNC & Duke

interview participants.

Findings & Education

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Email As Record

• Email = considered “insignificant”

mode of communication

• Appropriate user decisions

The “insignificant” nature of either their email or their job…

• “I don't think that I produce the kinds of documents that

are legally of interest, it's not like I am discovering DNA

• r anything, [it’s] not of potential relevance to a broad

enough spectrum of people to be worth it” [Sociology Faculty member]

• “[Email is] the equivalent of the pink "while you were out"

notes”

• “No, [archivists] have better things to do with their time”
• “There are a lot more interesting things happening at the

university”

• “I don't think of [emails] as permanent documents”
• “It's not as though I transfer deep thoughts via email.”

Important Emails Printed / Stored Somewhere Else

• “Things that are truly important typically

have a hard copy somewhere that gets routed through records retention.”

• “I’d like to believe that everything that we

have this is important we have in paper files.”

• “Whatever I think of as permanent I would

print out, I’ve never considered email to be archival.”

Technical / Monetary / Archival Challenges

• “It doesn’t seem like it’s worth spending resources

to save that sort of stuff forever.”

• “My instincts say no…and that’s simply out of a

belief about the relationship of that information to

• me. It’s all about context and what’s relevant at the

moment.”

• “You could kind of say that anyone would want to

save anything, but someone would have to write

• ut a history of it.”
• “I just see that as an insurmountable amount of

data.”

Email Should Be Saved…

• Historical Purposes: “That would be an

interesting thing to look at 1000 years from now;”

• Legal Purposes: medical, student,

administrative records

• Institutional Memory: “After I leave,

someone will have to know how I did things.”

Document Types

22% 23% 17% 9% 9% 6% 4% 6% 2% 2% Financial materials Administrative Records Student records Correspondence Grant materials Legal materials Patient records Research papers Email presentations

based on 59 responses

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Do You Follow a Retention Schedule?

Yes 30% No 63% I don't know 3% Other 4%

based on 70 responses

Storage, Organization & Management

• 1. Reliable Storage and Retrieval

Mechanisms

• 2. Comprehensible Organization Schemas
• 3. Metadata to Provide Context

Reliable Storage (digital preservation)

• “the practice of storing email messages with long-

term value on machine readable media such as CD- ROM, 3480 tape, or digital linear tape presumes that the hardware and software required to read the data will exist into the future.”

• Reserves the right to “accept into the State

Archives email stored only on those media it has the ability to read” and that it might “delegate the responsibility of long term maintenance and preservation to the creating agency.”

Comprehensible Organization Schemas

• The email messages must be
• rganized in a system, so that one

may determine the general topic to which the messages relate.

How Many Emails in Your Inbox?

1 to 50 40% 51 to 100 12% 101 to 500 22% 501 to 1,000 5%

• ver 1,000

19% I don't know 2% based on 97 responses

Number of Folders

32% 54% 14%

Medium (11-50) High (over 51) Low (under 10)

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No Folders People

• 25% have over 3000 messages in their

inbox,

• 25% have between 200 and 1000

messages

• 50% have fewer than 20
• Tend to be most satisfied,
• None of them reported problems finding

an older email

• Not compliant with state guidelines.

Context / Metadata

For those messages that have “permanent, archival value…”

• Messages transferred to the Division must

have metadata concerning the email and its related electronic records recorded on the Division’s electronic records inventory form.

Attachments

Methods for Preserving Relationship

78% 13% 6% 3% Store both in email cut and paste info print both together use naming conventions 32 responses. Respondents could give more than one answer.

User Knowledge

• “Users of email must understand the

ways in which email has changed workflow and business practices in recent years.”

• These users, “as well as information

technology (IT) professionals who will be asked to preserve [email] over time, must receive training regarding issues

• utlined in these guidelines.”

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Thanks!

The Managing the Digital University Desktop team would like to thank the National Historic Publications and Records Commission for their support; The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University for their cooperation. Our website and all of our research materials can be found at: http://ils.unc.edu/digitaldesktop The project team: Dr. Helen Tibbo, Timothy Pyatt, Dr. Paul Conway, David Mitchell, CRM; Frank Holt, Janis Holder, Kimberly Chang, Megan Winget, and Ruth Monnig