Digital Don’ts

The upcoming email management information session will focus on ways to use Outlook to manage your email.  But what about cutting down on the amount of email you send?  A recent article from Law Technology News talks about the 5 things you should never put in an email.  Although this article is litigation-focused, the tips they give are useful guidelines for anyone who sends email as part of his or her job.  Tips such as “do not email when angry” seem to be common sense but the fact that the authors are able to highlight multiple real-life examples for each of the 5 tips says otherwise.

While the article about email talks about records you don’t want to create in the first please, NPR’s Talk of the Nation recently conducted an interview with a recording expert to talk about records you want to keep.  If your office has ever thought about burning your files to CDs as a way to back them up or increase storage space then this article is a must-read!  The joke in the digital preservation world is that a CD-R or a DVD-R will last 5 years or forever, whichever comes first.  Although this interviewee extends that lifespan to 10 years it’s still not the permanent preservation that many people hope for.  They go on to talk about ways to preserve those digital records that will help extend their accessible years.  Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) and various types of back-ups are just some of the topics they touch on.  And while interviewee’s expertise is in sound recording everything he says about digital records is applicable to any file format you can burn to a CD.