The sort-out of my publications, reports and CSCW proceedings (broadly categorised as ‘things I had created and done’) confirmed that I have a particular interest in material I had created or had made significant contributions towards. It was undoubtedly rewarding to revisit the material – though I wouldn’t anticipate doing it again very often. In fact, it made me realise that just having the knowledge that all the material is available and easily accessible, is itself a very satisfying and reassuring thought. Of course, having a complete collection of work documents to draw on when assembling full sets of my publications and reports, was slightly unusual; most people might only have partial sets depending on what particular material they had saved in the course of their careers.

The items included in the category ‘things I had created and done’ are only a subset of all the work items I’ve kept over the years. I have previously digitised over 80 of my work book collection as described in the Electronic Bookshelf journey; I’ve created story boards for 30+ work books that I regarded as special in some or other; and my PAW-PERS collection of memorabilia contains aver 120 other items in the following additional categories:

Formal job documents (offer letters, job specs, pension info, pay slips etc.): I originally kept these for reference; but now, of course they have become very informative pieces of memorabilia.

Company information (brochures, newsletters etc.): Many of these are well presented documents providing detailed information about the organisations I worked for.

Recognition objects (certificates, long term service awards, contract win artefacts etc.): I didn’t keep the originals of certificates confirming I had completed in-company courses as they didn’t seem very significant; however I do value a certificate from my professional body and keep it framed on my study wall. I’ve kept the cut glass paperweight celebrating a contract win, and the cut glass bowl for long service, which are both in our crystal cabinet; though they are retained more because of their looks than as reminders of work. I also value the long service domino set (very nice in a large wooden box) which I chose deliberately because I knew I would want to keep it long term for both its utility and its looks.

People I worked with (humorous documents, social gatherings, leaving cards, etc.): These are generally mementos of the people I worked with and the activities we did together.

Associated activities (company sports and social clubs, trade unions, professional bodies etc.) These are mementos of my activities in organisations associated with my work, and they are surprisingly prominent in my collection. I guess they such organisations have played a significant part in my working life over the years.

In thinking back about what I’ve done with all these different sets of work items, I was reminded of how sometimes particular items have corrected a fact that I had mis-remembered. For example, for several years, I believed that I was the instigator of the Alvey project I was involved in (Cosmos). However, in trawling through my documents to create one of the Electronic Story Boards, I discovered that it was a colleague who had been the instigator and I was a very ardent subsequent advocate. I guess that often we remember things in the way we would like them to be, not necessarily the way they actually were. Hence, having some documentation or other artefact can cast a truer light on the past. However, it must be remembered that the documents we have may only be a subset of all the relevant documents that were produced; and/or that their contents may just be reflecting the biases of the authors. Hence, whatever the nature of our ‘record’, be it memory, or a selection of the relevant items that you have, or all of the items that you have, or, indeed, all the relevant items that exist in the world, we should always remember that it may not be the whole story.

As with my non-work mementos, most of these work items have been digitised and the originals disposed off; though a small number, which I decided are special in some way or other, have been retained in physical form. In this respect, these work items are very similar to other types of memento. However, there is one very significant difference: many of these work items will not be recognisable by my wife and family. That’s because my work took me to a different place and a different life for a part of each day – as it does for very many people; hence, work mementos are likely to mean more to the individual than to family, relatives and friends. Consequently, I suspect that such collections are even less likely than other types of mementos to be retained and maintained by future generations of the family. I believe this to be almost certainly true for physical work mementos (I can’t see people hanging onto bulky books and papers which mean little to them). However, I’m less sure about digital collections which, in principle, are much less obtrusive and much easier to keep in the short term, but do rely on some care and attention as computers are replaced and technology advances. In fact, this uncertainty must apply to all informally-held digital collections – too little time has passed so far to be able to discern if such material is being passed down the generations. Interestingly, I do see the possibility of Artificial Intelligence playing a role in managing such material, and this could significantly affect how much of its digital history a family may have access to in the future.

In summary, this short review of my work mementos seems to have thrown up the following insights:

• Categories of work mementos include; things the individual has created and done, work books, formal job documents, company information, recognition objects, people the individual has worked with, and associated activities.
• While work mementos are similar to other type of mementos, they do provide reminders of a part of life that is often very personal to the individual and often separate from family life. In as much as work is often done with other people, it is almost like a parallel life with a separate family; hence, it generates a separate set of mementos.
• Work concerns making, creating and doing things; and if individuals are in any way proud of what they have done, then they may well be keen to retain examples of what they achieved and to inspect it from time to time.
• It is very satisfying and reassuring to know that examples of what you have produced at work, are safely stored away and accessible when you want them. Just being able to have those thoughts may be as rewarding as actually looking at the material.
• Our ‘record’ of events is only as good as the material we have, be it memory or a few relevant artefacts, or lots of artefacts. We should always remain open to the possibility we don’t have all the facts.
• Work mementos are probably less likely to be passed on down family lines than other types of mementos.
• Physical work mementos are less likely to be passed on down family lines than digital work mementos.
• Artificial intelligence may result in many more digital mementos of all types being passed on reliably down the generations.

This morning I finished digitising the CSCW conference proceedings, including the creation of a bookmarked contents list for each one (rather a tedious process), and downloaded the PDFs to the Sidebooks app on my iPad. Although this was a largely mundane exercise, I was stimulated from time to time when I came across author and project names that I had become familiar with while I was working in the CSCW field in the early 1990s. Reflecting on this in the shower this morning, I remembered my conclusion a week or so ago that, for memorabilia, the journey was often better than the destination. Suddenly, in a deluge of shower illumination, I realised that it was the remembering that had been fulfilling; and that the act of remembering is an act of doing; and that ­any thoughts about memorabilia – even just pondering the fact that they are where you put them and can be accessed when you wish – are ‘doing’ acts. It is when items cease to stimulate any thought or interest that they become worthless. Conversely, while items of memorabilia still inspire some physical or thinking action, they still have some value for the individual.

I continued to think through the meaning of this insight and concluded that it has significant implications for why we keep things; and that it will necessitate the adjustment of parts of the OFC tutorial text (though I must add that I’m sure these ideas are not new – but I have the luxury of not having to trawl the huge literature to see what has been documented before: that is the job of academics who should be appropriately paid to do a very difficult, laborious and hugely important job). This experience has cemented my belief in the innovative power of the shower, and makes me wonder just how important ablutions have been to the development of modern civilisation over the centuries.

The final stage in this sort out of work books/documents concerns the seven volumes of proceedings of conferences on Computer Supported Cooperative Work that appear in the picture below.

The first of these events was held in Austin, Texas, in 1986 and I was there to experience the excitement of a new field being born. It was a field which embraced the Cosmos project that I was participating in at the time, and a field in which I actively worked for the following five years. In 1989 I was to organise the first European CSCW conference, EC-CSCW89. Hence, I am particularly attached to the proceedings of both the 1986 and 1989 events, though the 1986 volume is in poor condition with the cover having come away, and the 1989 volume is spiral bound. So, I’ve decided to turn both volumes into hardback books and to incorporate some additional pages of related material in the process.

As for the remaining 5 volumes, although I attended all but one of the events they document, I am unlikely to want to look at them in the future so have decided to digitise them and include them in my electronic bookshelf collection so that at least the covers and spines will be visible for decor and I’ll have the comfort of knowing that the text is immediately accessible should I want to take a look at it.

A trawl through my CV to identify major pieces of work I’d produced prompted the discovery of some memorable material – and some I’d forgotten about.  The end result was 98 documents all neatly packaged as numbered PDFs and recorded in an index. However, while I expected them to be mostly reports I’d written, the documents turned out to be much more diverse than that. This was because some of my work assignments had been rather open-ended in subject matter and long term in timescale, so there was not necessarily one or more reports that could represent my efforts. Instead, I started looking for documents that would tell a story about my involvement and what had happened. Hence, of the 98 documents, only about half were substantive reports written entirely by myself or in conjunction with others. A further 20 were shorter documents written by myself. The remainder were short documents written with others (16); documents providing context for work I was involved in (17); summaries of what was going on or handover reports when I left an assignment (6); newsletters produced by myself (3); and, finally, two documents were hardcopies of special editions of HCI-related magazines which were on my bookshelf and which I was loath to part with.

It was hardly surprising that such a range of documents emerged since the memorable aspects of work involve more than just one’s own efforts, and usually includes what we do with others and what is going on about us. In fact, I had to be pretty selective in my choices since my work document collection includes most of the items that I received and produced; and the index to the collection makes it very easy and quick to list all the documents related to a particular topic or, in this case, assignment.

The process I went through for each element of my CV was to first search for any specific document I remembered and wanted to take a copy of. Then, to produce a list of all the index entries related to that assignment and to go through the list (sometimes including a hundred or more line items) and to note the reference number of any that I wanted to look at further. This was a very good test of my newly revamped filing system in which documents are no longer stored in a document management system but simply reside in Windows folders named with the appropriate reference number (see entry in Personal Document Management Journey).  It proved very easy and quick to find documents and to open them up  – which was a good job because, inevitably, I was having to look at several different documents before making a decision about which one to go for.

I had decided before the start of this process that I only wanted to keep electronic copies and that the only hardcopies I might keep would be the fourteen that were already on my book case. That is how it turned out, though I did throw out one of the fourteen – a rather thick spiral bound item which consisted largely of a user manual. None of these items are sturdy enough to stand up on their own – they are either folded papers, stapled papers, spiral bound documents, or magazines. So I acquired a large portfolio box from TK Max inscribed with ‘Around the World’ on the spine – a highly visible distinguishing feature. Four of the hardcopies were in a ring binder, and these too were placed in the portfolio box, together with a printout of the index,  so that all this material is now in one place and not flopping around on the shelves.

Regarding the electronic versions, in some cases they were stored in my files as PDFs, so little further work was required. However, many were stored as either multi-page TIF files or as MS Office Word or Powerpoint files. These were converted to PDFs using the eCopy PDF PRO application. For the larger documents I created linked content lists in the form of sets of bookmarks, numbered each file, and moved a copy of each file into a special folder setup to be the master of this set of material. However, my preferred way of viewing such material is within the Sidebooks application on the iPad. Files can be transferred to Sidebooks using Dropbox and this example of system integration works brilliantly. It only took a few seconds to copy all the files (362 Mb in total) and to place them into the Dropbox folder on my laptop. They showed up in the Sidebooks Dropbox area within a minute or two; and then each one was selected in turn and took just a few seconds – none more than 10 seconds – to download into Sidebooks where they can be displayed as either a text list of file names or as variously sized thumbnails as shown below.

The exercise is now complete. I don’t know how often I’ll be looking at the documents – probably not very much – maybe never; but, just knowing they are there is a reassuring feeling – not having them there might generate a little nagging wish. Furthermore, going through all this material and being reminded of what I have done has been a very fulfilling experience. As I keep being reminded, in the matter of memorabilia the journey is often better than the destination.