Digital Preservation Matters - 19 September 2008

When to shred: Purging data saves money, cuts legal risk. Mary Brandel. Computerworld. September 18, 2008.

Many organizations never throw away data unless they run out of data, and they increase the amount of data by 20% - 50% each year. Not everything can or should be saved, it is important to decide what should be kept and for how long. Many organizations should be saving less data. The increase of data is growing faster than the decline of the cost of storage. The cost of storing and backing up data, including multiple copies of data, is increasing, as is the cost of e-discovery for lawsuits, which can range from $1 million to $3 million per terabyte of data. Electronic records management can help value the data and determine the retention period.

Edinburgh Repository Fringe. Website. August 2008.

This is a website of a ‘repository festival’ in Edinburgh which looks at repository issues, ideas, new perspectives, new projects, and interaction about repositories. It includes some documents, slides, and video streams of the discussions. A few items from the sessions:

• Faculty repositories: variety of sources, aware they need to make data available, most stored on department servers or desktops, sharing is often by email, large datasets are a problem. They want them published on the web and find linking very useful.
• They want a secure and user-friendly way to store and share research data, as well as the infrastructure to publish and preserve data.
• We need to gather requirements, look at current and planned services, meet needs.
• Promote favorable information: 87% said items found at the top of search results are seen as more authoritative

Poor E-Mail Archive Habits Plague Businesses. Leo King. Computerworld. August 31, 2008.

Research shows that employees do not properly archive e-mails because they are either too busy or are unsure how. Most employees do not receive guidance on how they should be archiving their email; many organizations do not have a policy.

• 30% said they had lost important documents
• 50% say email archiving is too time consuming
• 30% say it is too complicated
• 41 % leave files attached to e-mails forever
• 50% have an enforced limit on their email storage
• Over 25% save the files to the company system
• 28 % save them to their hard drive

A lax approach or failure to communicate will take up extra space and the organization risks losing important information.