I asked Tom Jackson if he could suggest anyone who might be interested in working with me on Personal Document Management and he introduced me to Ann O’Brien of Loughborough University’s Department of Information Science. Ann and I duly spoke and discussed what I have been doing and what topics could be explored. A couple of Ann’s immediate off-the-cuff thoughts were:

Transferable Index: Based on my experience and system, would it be possible to develop a simple index and framework taxonomy which other individuals would find easy and useful to use?

A life in industry: Perhaps I could write a ‘book’ illustrated by references out to some of the contents of the filing system. This could be an ordinary book or an eBook.

In the short term, we agreed to explore if there would be any benefit in addressing the topic “The artefact in the digital age” using those documents I had resisted destroying, for whatever reason, after scanning. Ann will investigate if any research has been done on this topic and if it is likely that such a paper would be accepted in a journal; and I will provide Ann with a number of examples of such documents.