Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

Wesleyan is one of the 220 or so members of Coalition for Networked Information . Library pays the annual subscription and they encourage both ITS and Library to be represented in its meetings. This year, I decided to attend the meeting with Barbara Jones from the library to try to learn more about this organization. As some of you may know, I have been complaining about the existence of too many of these organizations – EDUCAUSE, NERCOMP, CLAC, NITLE – to name a few, and the overlap in programming and goals. So, I wanted to know what this organization was all about. I also presented on our WesFiles implementation which was reasonably well attended. Barbara and I attended a roundtable on Monday morning. You have to be invited to be part of it and they encourage heads of both the Library and IT organization to participate. It was really a funny way to run a meeting. Cliff Lynch, who is the Director of CNI, began the meeting by asking each of us to talk about what we are doing about records management and retention and did not provide any strict guidelines on how much time each of us have to talk about it. As a result, this went on for 2:30 hours with some (less shy people) taking a lot longer than the others. We were the first ones to start, so not knowing the clear format, we did not spend enough time.

The bottom line, after all of the talk, is that it is the same problem everywhere. Records retention in the electronic age is ill defined and that the lack of standards makes it even more complicated on how to do it. In addition, there are no guarantees that what is preserved today will be usable later. So, everyone is improvising. The relative few who are doing anything about this are doing it by developing data warehouses that contain point in time data. This certainly is better than not having anything.

I pointed out that whereas we are doing what we can in electronic records retention (such as financial data) driven by regulations and federal mandates, we are not doing anything at all from the historical value perspective. There was a consensus that it is the auditors and lawyers who are driving this type of retention. Many are finding it difficult to justify the added expenses associated with record retention for archival purposes.

I mentioned that we have been archiving our online course catalog for the past 6 or so years. A few schools are archiving subsets of their websites. It was not at all clear what that meant – are they keeping screenshots or the actual web pages? If it is the latter, what is the guarantee that the links in the pages will work years from now?

My own conclusions:

• We seem to feel that because information is available digitally, it is easy to preserve and storage is cheap.
• Indiscriminately  storing data does not buy us anything in the end. We should set a few achievable goals which in turn will help decide what information to retain and for how long and most importantly in ways that it will be useful in the future.
• The current lack of plans for retaining important institutional data is not good. We need some plan… and I hope the right groups at Wesleyan start thinking about this sooner than later. We can certainly help architect systems and offer suggestions on how best to do it, but I don’t think ITS should be the one to decide on what to retain, and for how long.

Some of the more exciting things I learned during this meeting is on Cyberinfrastructure and I will discuss that in the next posting.