ECURE 2005

Tempe, Arizona

Empowering the Individual: Managing the Digital University Desktop

http://www.ils.unc.edu/digitaldesktop/

Ubiquitous, diversified, distributed, networked computing is an omnipresent feature of academic life today. Such desktop computing allows users to gather, create, and transmit large numbers and a wide variety of documents and other information with a few keystrokes, but it does very little to help users name and organize their materials, retrieve them easily in the future, or identify those items that should be maintained for specific lengths of time or archived for posterity, even when records retention and disposition schedules exist.

The ease with which users can create, copy, and distribute electronic information to others exacerbates the traditional challenges of records management. Digitally transmitted documents - email and all manner of associated attachments - stand as a particularly problematic area. Even people who have great skill in organizing the files they create, may have difficulty with the daily flow of e-mail and saving attachments in appropriate locations that others have created and named. Indeed, none of the typical desktop applications such as word processing, e-mail, or presentation software, have electronic records management (ERM) features so users lacking any records management training or even instruction in filing are left to their own devices.

The success of desktop records management and subsequent archiving of material from the university environment presently depends on the individual and his or her specific information management behaviors. Up to this point very little was known about these behaviors and even less about how to optimize them to serve the historical, legal, financial, instructional and scholarly requirements of higher education.

Enter the Managing the Digital University Desktop project. Funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, MDUD is a joint project taking place at [click] Duke University and [2 clicks] the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study computer file management practices in academic and administrative units at both universities.