This entry has been jointly authored by Peter Tolmie and Paul Wilson

A key part of the motivation for keeping texts is that they contain information – nuggets – that have some kind of future value. It’s rare for a whole document to be seen as having such value in its entirety. Nuggets are more often certain sentences or paragraphs. The question is, what happens to that value over the lifespan of an archive. Does the value of specific nuggets persist? Does it change? Does it grow or reduce in relevance? Does it become eroded to the point of obsoletion? And, given the same documents at some later point in time, would the same nuggets be identified, or would something else stand out as being more important?

To assess the use and impact of identifying nuggets, three separate investigations will be conducted using documents containing nuggets that were collected over the last 38 years. In all cases, investigations will be undertaken with reference to the individual who originally identified the nuggets. Two of the investigations will focus on the individual reflecting himself upon his use of nuggets. The third investigation will focus upon extracting information about the nuggets and their use through discussion.

The investigations will be performed using two separate sets of material:

Set 1: A set of 19 MindMaps relating to esoteric books.

Set 2: Documents from the PAWDOC collection.

Approach

Investigation 1: The first investigation will be a written exercise using the set of Mindmaps and will attempt to assess:

a) Whether individual nuggets can still be recalled;
b) Whether the sources of those individual nuggets can still be recalled;
c) How significant specific nuggets are considered to be by the individual concerned;
d) What other nuggets, if any, are associated with the one in question;
e) What specific concept(s) individual nuggets are believed to have contributed towards.

Investigation 2: The second investigation will also be a written exercise and will explore what nuggets, if any, can be identified by the individual concerned in unmarked versions of randomly selected documents from the PAWDOC collection where nuggets have previously been identified. From this exercise it is hoped to deduce:

i) Whether nuggets lose their vitality over time, with new concepts being derived and becoming established.
ii) Whether looking at the documents anew, within a distinct context, will lead to the identification of different nuggets with different relevance to the individual.

Note that the first 2 investigations are interleaved so as to be able to maximise the amount of discussion possible in the concluding interview.

Investigation 3: This investigation will be conducted as an interview and will explore similar themes to those tackled in the prior investigations but in a more open-ended way, so that the reasoning involved in retaining documents for the sake of specific features can be examined in greater detail. The interview will also seek to examine in detail topics that have spanned all three investigations.

Method

Investigation 1: Nineteen nuggets, each from separate MindMaps, will be randomly selected from the MindMaps of books on esoteric subjects. Randomisation will be achieved by creating a template that divides an A4 page into 24 numbered areas of equal size. A random number generator will then be used to create nineteen separate numbers ranging from 1 to 24. The Researcher, Peter Tolmie, will generate the numbers and use each one in conjunction with one of the MindMaps and the template to identify the nugget(s) present in that location. If more than one nugget occurs in that location, the topmost one will be selected.

The Researcher will assemble the nineteen nuggets and send them to the PAWDOC Owner and Subject, Paul Wilson, who will be asked to provide a written answer to the following questions in relation to each one:

• Do you remember where this nugget came from?
• Do you remember why you might have marked this out as a nugget?
• How important do you consider this nugget to be now?
• Do you remember what other nuggets were associated with this one?
• How did you use this nugget and what other things did you develop on the back of it?

The Subject will then be sent the original MindMaps in which the nuggets appeared, and will be asked the following questions for each one:

• Do you remember more about why you marked this as a nugget now?
• Now you see the MindMap it came from and the other nuggets it was associated with, do you see it as more or less important?
• Do you remember anything more now about how you used it or what other ideas it may have contributed to?

The Subject will return his responses to the Researcher, who will categorise them and place the results in an analysis spreadsheet. The overall analysis and specific instances regarding the Subject’s responses and reactions will be written up as the findings for Investigation 1.

Investigation 2: Nineteen separate documents, each containing nuggets, will be randomly selected from documents included in the PAWDOC collection between 1981 and 2011. Randomisation will be achieved by using a random number generator to create numbers relating to the 16925 entries in the PAWDOC Index sequenced in the order in which they were created.  The Researcher will generate the numbers and use his copy of the Excel version of the Index to identify the first nineteen of the entries for which an electronic file exists (some entries just contain the information they relate to and have no associated documents – these are identifiable by the contents of the Movement Status field); and for which the associated electronic files are likely to contain highlighted nuggets (items such as, for example, Health & Safety booklets, are unlikely to contain highlighted nuggets). He will send the list of numbers to the Subject who will open the folder labelled with each particular number, take a copy of the first file that appears in each folder and will send the files back to the Researcher. The Subject will take as little notice of the file titles as possible by setting up the Windows File Explorer window to display only the beginning of the file name so that only the Reference Number, which is always at the start of the file name, is visible. Should the Researcher deem any of these files to be unsuitable, he will send additional numbers to the Subject until a satisfactory set of nineteen documents that contain nuggets has been obtained. Then, using a cropping tool or by obtaining a clean copy of the document from elsewhere, he will send clean unmarked copies back to the Subject. The Subject will read the documents, mark up any text that he considers to be nuggets, and will send the documents back to the Researcher.

The Researcher will then make a comparison between the original nuggets identified and the new nuggets identified and record the results in the analysis spreadsheet. The overall analysis will be written up as the findings for Investigation 2.

Investigation 3: Nineteen nuggets, each from a separate document, will be randomly selected from randomly selected documents placed in the PAWDOC collection between 1981 and 2011. Randomisation will be achieved by using the same procedure employed in Investigation 2.  The Researcher will take the first nineteen suitable documents that contain nuggets and randomly select one specific nugget from each document using a random number generator. The nineteen nuggets will be assembled together and presented to the Subject who will be asked to answer a similar set of questions to the first set of questions in Investigation 1. These questions will form the rough frame for the first part of an interview in which the various nuggets will be discussed.

The Subject will then be shown the original documents in which the nuggets appeared, and will be asked the following questions for each one, which will form the second part of the interview mentioned above:

• Do you remember more about why you marked this as a nugget now?
• Now you see the document it came from and the other nuggets it was associated with, do you see it as more or less important?
• Do you remember anything more now about how you used it or what other ideas it may have contributed to?
• Are there things in the original document that you didn’t mark as a nugget at the time that you would mark as a nugget now? If so, why?

A third and final part of the interview will explore the responses from across all of the assessments in a more open-ended fashion to generate deeper insights and discussion.

The Researcher will then transcribe the interview, categorise the responses and place the results in the analysis spreadsheet. The overall analysis and specific instances regarding the Subject’s responses and reactions will be written up as the findings for Investigation 3.

Conclusions: The Researcher will use the findings from all three Investigations to write the overall conclusions of the investigation.