Since our initial phone conversation on 28th Feb, Peter Tolmie and I have Skyped twice more – we seem to have got into a pattern of speaking every four weeks or so. In our second conversation, Peter pointed out to me that my PAWDOC filing system was just another manifestation of my inclination to keep things – as amply demonstrated in the various journeys documented in pwofc.com. He asked me what I thought I’d learnt from all these experiences, and I recounted a few things that immediately came to mind. Afterwards, however, I began to think that there were a great many more learnings dotted around the website. So I duly trawled through pwofc.com and recorded in a spreadsheet anything that looked like a finding. For good measure, I used another worksheet in the same spreadsheet to list all the requirements and findings specified in the paper about PAWDOC that was published in Behaviour & Information Technology (BIT) in 2001. I’ve given the spreadsheet to Peter and it will provide a base set of information for our investigations going forward.

My re-assessment of the BIT paper reminded me that one of the things I was thinking about when I wrote it was how one could use the key points in the documents you read to develop one’s knowledge. This idea stemmed from my practice of putting a line next to key points – or nuggets as I termed them – in documents. I remembered that I’d made a start on this work some 17 years ago by recording in a Mind Mapping programme the nuggets I found in books about the Pyramids etc. Peter and I discussed the possibility of my revisiting this material in a ‘Nugget Management’ journey sometime.

In our last Skype call on 25th April, Peter asked if I could keep an auto-ethnographic log of my keeping activities to provide us with more base material to draw on in our analysis activities. I duly created a spreadsheet with the headings listed below and am now recording all instances in which I make a specific effort to store a physical or digital artefact. The word ‘specific’ is used to exclude general keeping of things like email messages in email folders; and the word ‘artefact’ is used to explicitly require that a whole integral item is kept not just information removed from it like the name of a species from a plant label.

• Ref No
• Date
• Item
• How the instance arose
• Reason for keeping
• Initial actions and decisions made
• Actions taken

Peter’s comment on my request for his views on my recording scheme was “This is great. It’s not how I would have done it myself, but that doesn’t matter at all. The main thing is that it works for you. Just different work practices because we come from different backgrounds. Nothing more.”; and I doubt that I, on my own, would have come up with the idea of a generalised keeping log. Herein are clues as to the sheer unique and precious value of collaboration with our fellows.

Having initiated a preservation planning regime for the collection, and having moved it onto the Windows 10 platform, I’m feeling that the only remaining things I need to do with it are to find it a permanent home and to write up the findings of this lengthy experiment. I took a step forward on the latter activity earlier this week when I had a very interesting phone call with Peter Tolmie, a UK Ethnographer based in the School of Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen in Germany. I was given Peter’s name by Richard Harper when I asked if he knew of anyone who is knowledgeable about how professionals manage their documents and who would be interested in working on a wrap-up paper with me. An initial phone call with Peter last Thursday indicated that we have a great many common interests – I found it a very stimulating conversation indeed. I’ve sent Peter some documents describing the collection and we’ve agreed to talk again on 21^st March.

Regarding the search for a home for the collection (which is documented in various posts in this Blog going back to 2015), my current efforts lie in conversations I’m having with Dr James Peters, the Archivist of the National Archive for the History of Computing at Manchester University, who has kindly agreed to help me in my search. In a phone call last month, James told me he was waiting for a response from someone he had emailed, but that, if there was no interest from that source, he could issue a note to a relevant mailing list on my behalf. If it is to be the mailing list route, I’m hoping to get James’ advice on what needs to go in the note.

Backing Up has always been an essential part of maintaining my personal document collection; but it was never something I enjoyed – I did it out of a fear of loss. And I have, indeed, experienced loss: in 1996 one of the MO Disks I was using became corrupted and I lost a number of files; in 2004 my laptop was stolen and my whole document collection had to be re-instated from the backups; and in 2017 I had a system crash and, although the repair company was able to recover all my data in that instance, that might not always be the case.

When I was working, I used to take a backup of the more recently created material every month or so, as well as complete versions of the whole collection as it kept growing. This produced multiple copies on many disks which increased my confidence in being able to replace any file that got corrupted or mislaid, but which required managing in its own right as the number of disks grew. As time went by I added other backup mechanisms including storing a copy on another laptop in the househoId, storing a copy on disk in a relative’s house located many miles away, and storing a copy on disk at my son’s house in New Zealand.

After I retired I tried to put the backing up on a more orderly basis and finally fixed on five different types of backup – Cloud, copy on another laptop in the house, local hard disk, remote (in the UK) hard disk, and New Zealand copy on memory stick. I scheduled backups in my iPad calendar for each of these (though, for the Cloud, it was more a matter of checking that it was working and that I could recover from it). However, the iPad calendar doesn’t have a To Do mechanism and I wasn’t looking at the calendar anything like as often as I used to at work. Consequently, I kept missing scheduled backup activities – and, in most cases, didn’t realise I’d missed them; and when I did realise I just kept putting off what was an annoying extra thing to do. One answer would have been to get a To Do app – but I’d had enough of To Dos at work.

The opportunity to come up with an alternative approach, came when I created a Users’ Guide for my document collection in May 2018. I structured the Guide so that it had a Quick Reference Guide to the Collection on the front page, and a Backup Quick Start Guide on the back page. The latter listed the different types of backups to be performed and provided cells to be filled in with a date when that particular backup had been done, as shown below.

This was a definite improvement over dates dotted about a calendar, but unfortunately the schedule was still hidden because the Users’ Guide was tucked away inside an archive storage box.

When I replaced my Windows 7 laptop for a Windows 10 version in December 2018, I decided to review all my backup arrangements again and to try to overcome this lack of visibility. The answer turned out to be really quite simple: I have a display frame for the latest issues of UK postage stamps, on the wall in front of where I sit at my desk. So, I created a table with columns for when backups have been done and when they are due; and this table now resides in the display fame as shown below.

I have a clear view of when the next backups are due every time I sit down at my desk. The next time I miss a backup it’ll be because I just don’t enjoy doing them, not because of blissful ignorance!

Last month I heard back from the keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham, Mark Dorrington, who said that my collection may not be a good fit with their archives and that, in any case, they were not geared up to deal with such a large digital collection. However he did suggest trying the National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester and provided a link to its web page [NB. Link updated on 18Jan2023].

I have, in fact, already been round the houses with the University of Manchester Library; however, that was not specifically in relation to this particular archive, and it was before I had done any digital preservation work on the collection. So, today I tried making contact with someone specifically concerned with this particular archive and was told that the archivist for this and a number of other special collections is Dr. James Peters. I duly emailed him with the following opening para: ” Dr. Peters, I’m contacting you as the Archivist in charge of the National Archive for the History of Computing (NAHC). I have a collection of documents which reflect the development and application of computers over the last 40 years, and would be grateful for your advice as to whether the collection has any merit and where it could be placed.” I followed this with a description of the background to the collection and of its contents. I’m hoping that my rather indirect approach on this occasion might engender some discussion rather than the outright rejection which I’m becoming used to.

Back in 2015 I reported on my efforts to find a permanent home for my document collection. I had no success with any of the organisations I mentioned in that post, and subsequently turned my attention to trying to find a contemporary historian who is interested in the development of computing. I came across one Daniel Wilson (no relation) based at Cambridge University who has a particular interest in the history of science and technology; and I duly contacted him. Despite being interested in hearing about the contents of the collection, he felt unable to help, explaining that “this will require significant work and few people have the budget or the time, given current pressures”. He gave me the name of another contemporary historian at Leicester University who I also tried emailing, but, despite sending a follow-up, I got no response. I’ve concluded that individual academics just have too little time to take on the management of a collection that isn’t absolutely central to a specific piece of work that they are doing.

I am now turning my attention, once more, to institutions, and have just sent an email to the Keeper of Manuscripts and Special Collections (MSC) at the University of Nottingham. I came across this organisation in a JISC email which advised that MSC has just joined the DPC. I was able to mention in the email that, not only have I just completed a digital preservation exercise on the PAWDOC collection using templates which are published in the DPC website; but also that the PAWDOC collection contains much material from the Cosmos project in which the University’s Department of Computer Science took part – perhaps those little extra bits of information might spark an extra bit of interest.