Understanding and
Empowering the Individual…
Preserving the Public Record
and Institutional History
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Email Management, Electronic
Records, and Beyond
Dr. Helen R. Tibbo
School of Information and Library Science
UNC-Chapel Hill
Timothy Pyatt
Duke Unversity
http://www.ils.unc.edu/digitaldesktop
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Thought for the day….
“The end-user manages e-mail.”
-ARMA Guideline for Managing E-mail
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Thank You to
The National Historical Publications and
Records Commission
for funding this project
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Goals for Today
 Project background, goals, and
objectives.
 Discussion of the methodologies used
for data collection and analysis in this
project.
 Overview of findings.
 Presentation of FAQs.
 Training tools – slides and tutorial.
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Digital Desktop Project Team
 Dr. Helen Tibbo, Co-PI, Professor, UNC-SILS
 Dr. Paul Conway, Director, Digital Asset Initiatives, Duke
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Libraries, Duke
Kim Chang, Co-Project Manager
Megan Winget, Co-Project Manager, SILS Ph.D. student
Timothy Pyatt, University Archivist, Duke
Janis Holder, University Archivist, UNC
David Mitchell, Records Manager, Duke
Frank Holt, Records Manager, UNC
Ruth Monnig, SILS Ph.D. Student, 1st PM
Russell Koonts, Archivist, DUMC
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Advisory Board
 Deborah Barreau, Asst. Professor, SILS
 Michel Bezy, Program Director, Strategy Autonomic Computing,
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IBM
Elizabeth Bunting, Assoc. VP for Legal Affairs, UNC System
Mark Crowell, Asst. V-C for Economic Development, UNC
Charles Dollar, Archival Consultant Eric Mlyn, Director of
Robinson Scholars Program
Joel Dunn, Director, Networking Collaboration, UNC
Kelly Eubank, Electronic Records Archivist, NC Dept. Cultural
Resources
Roslyn Holdzkom, Asst. Curator of Manuscripts, UNC
Madeleine Perez, University Archivist, UNC-Charlotte
Joanna Carey Smith, Associate University Counsel, UNC
Jeanne Smythe, Director, Computing Policy, UNC
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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, and by extension, throughout
the 16-campus UNC system and across
academia…
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Project Goals - 2
 Based on the analysis of user needs and
practices, as well as the North Carolina
Public Records Act, develop optimized email 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.
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Project Goals - 3
 Develop educational opportunities
(workshops, FAQs, exercises, webbased courses, etc.) to optimize faculty,
administrator, and staff use and
management of desktop electronic
documents.
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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 16campus UNC system via a statewide
conference and to other universities via
the records management/ archival
literatures and conferences and the
project website.
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Methodology
 In order to learn how faculty, staff, and
administrators manage their electronic
materials we
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Conducted campus-wide surveys at UNCChapel Hill and Duke University.
Interviewed 100 individuals.
Interviewed approximately 15 IT staff.
 We coded and analyzed the data from
the interviews using NVIVO software.
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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.
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Who We Surveyed
 8,334 addresses at UNC.
 17,327 addresses at Duke.
 About 212 emails bounced at UNC.
 About 1,115 bounced at Duke.
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1899 Valid Duke Survey
Duke Respondents
Respondents
Faculty
27%
507
1392
Staf f /Employee
73%
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1076 Valid UNC Responses
UNC Respondents
Faculty
40%
432
644
Staff/Employee
60%
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Pooled our questions.
Used words like, “appraisal,” and
“authenticity.”
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Developing the Conceptual
Framework
 Categorized our questions.
 Because we are exploring how
individuals are functioning as their own
records managers and archivists, we
linked our questions to basic archival
functions.
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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.
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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.
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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 or 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.
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Appraisal questions
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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 one?
Do you think any of the email messages or
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?
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Authenticity Questions
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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?
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Arrangement
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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?
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Description
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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?
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Physical Preservation
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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
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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?
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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.
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Selection Framework
 Tried to apply Samuels’ Varsity Letters
model:
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Confer credentials
Convey knowledge
Foster socialization
Conduct research
Sustain the institution
Provide public service
Promote culture
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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 our population to apply a model
blindly.
 We would select from faculty and staff
from various departments and
administrative units.
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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.
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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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Life After Coding
 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.
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Building the FAQs
 Looked at Email handling guidelines.
 Looked at FAQs.
 Looked at our data.
 Studied NC Public Records Law.
 Designed preliminary FAQs.
 Held focus group of UNC & Duke
interview participants.
 Revised and fleshed out FAQs and site
design.
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History of FAQs
 Originally we thought the right manual
had not been created but that we would
write it!
 Many manuals appeared but life was not
better.
 Reluctantly we concluded people don’t
read manuals.
 We hope people will consult the FAQs.
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Findings – Lots of Behaviors
 Pilers and filers.
 Obsessive-compulsive organizers.
 The mess-tolerant.
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Lots of Different Practices
 Different email applications.
 Different capabilities of each system.
 Different understanding of security,
backup, and privacy.
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The Times They Are A-Changin’
 How do people manage email after
GMail?
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No file
No weed
 How does this influence management of
other materials?
 Records management in the day of
extreme personalization????
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Implications for Archivists &
Records Managers
 Powerful search engines.
 Successful searching/sorting in email
and our other large files depends on
personal knowledge as well as search
engine.
 Archival community, partnered with the
IT community must come up with new
retrieval paradigms.
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Next Steps
 Make useful changes to the tools you will
see today based on your input.
 Write articles for American Archivist and
other journals.
 Input what we learned into the design of
electronic records management at UNC
and Duke.
 Final report to NHPRC.
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Regrets & Future Studies
 Regret we couldn’t interview enough
people to say definitively
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Faculty to this; staff to that
Dukies do this; Tar Heels do that
 Need to study behavior now and see
influence of new software.
 Data mining techniques need to be
developed.
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