Creating Information In Appropriate Formats
When designing a new process or system which will create information it is advisable to think about the format in which it would be most appropriate to create it. Issues regarding its expected longevity, security and access concerns, potential for future reuse and its possible evidential value may all have a bearing. The question of information format is often overlooked in favour of a concentration on its content which can prove a costly mistake. Once again it is about ensuring that what you decide is fit for purpose. It is the equivalent of selecting the right tool to complete a manual task: a small hand-pushed mower might be fine for a garden lawn, but virtually useless for preparing a football pitch.
The various purposes for which email is often used represent an all too common example of widespread misuse of a format for creating information. People often treat it as the equivalent of a phone conversation and say things or express views which they would never ordinarily commit to paper. People forget that an email is a written record which may come back to haunt them. At the other extreme, a significant amount of formal business activity is often conducted via email with contracts being agreed and projects signed off. Whilst this may represent a perfectly legitimate form of business communication, it is also often the case that organisations fail to manage email appropriately, leaving potentially vital business records to languish unmanaged in an individual's inbox.
The World Wide Web has revolutionised our ability to quickly and cheaply publish information. When compared with the cost and time involved in manually printing and distributing a publication, it is little wonder that more and more institutions are choosing to only publish online versions of publications. But what if decisions are being made against the content of that publication which means it suddenly becomes necessary to know exactly what it said at a particular point in time some months or years ago? Unless your web content management system has sufficient capability to track changes and 'roll back' to how it appeared at a certain date it may be impossible to prove what your Research Ethics Handbook, for example, stated at the time a particular research project commenced.
An ever-increasing number of users are beginning to make use of externally-hosted social software services in which to create and store content. This could be a wiki being used to develop ideas within a project team, an online photographic service to store learning materials or even a 'virtual world' such as Second Life to create complex 3D models. Such technologies offer marvellous potential, but what would happen should the company providing the service suddenly go bankrupt or otherwise withdraw the service? Would you still be able to access the content you have trusted to it? There may also be questions to address regarding who actually owns the rights to the intellectual property of an object created in Second Life. Is it the individual user, the institution or Linden Labs who run this virtual world?
Lastly, there is the question of longevity and preservation. Much of the information we create will have a short lifespan of less than 5 years making questions regarding their longevity largely irrelevant. But a small percentage may need to be kept for far longer, perhaps for decades or even centuries. It may seem a real advance to scan your entire collection of paper files and store them on a handful of CD ROMs, but what if some of those records will need to be accessed in 70 to 100 years' time? In a few short years, it is more than likely that a CD-ROM drive on a new PC will be as rare a sight as a floppy disk drive is today. Unless adequate preventative measures are taken those invaluable records may be as good as lost.
