1. Managing e-mail for the benefit of better knowledge Gayle Evans Head of Knowledge & Information Management National Museum Wales

2. Tame it or loose it !

3. Trusted information

4. What do these two men have in common? Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913) Evolution through natural selection

5. Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. —Charles Darwin from "The Origin of Species"

6. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913) But it was Russel Wallace who in Feb. 1858 wrote ‘On the tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type’ which ge sent to Darwin July 1958 – Wallace and Darwin present at the Linnaean Society

7. Almost forgotten man of science Remembered – why? Traceable written communication

8. Knowledge drain Business and the academic worlds are based on facts and communication The lack of either can be devastating The tools that enable the creation and transmission of knowledge are single largest growing technology in the world today But the controls to manage and preserve this knowledge are just beginning

9. E-mail – fantastic growth University of Washington – 60,000 active accounts – 500,000 e-mail messages per day (sent & received) – 1,083 per minute – Growing at a rate of 25 % / year – by 2010 will top 1 million /day – E-mail – most heavily used application

10. E-mail - fact 541 million workers worldwide rely on e-mail Worldwide – + 60 billion messages sent/ day More that half are spam Others maybe infected with viruses, worms, spyware or illegal content Yet this is the single most relied upon form of communication

11. Are we heading for a e-disaster

12. Knowledge and the Extinction Age Interval of abrupt change in Earth’s history End of the Cretaceous (K) period & opened the Tertiary (T) period Extinction of over 95% of living things KT boundary

13. E-mail – Essential not Easy Number 1 form of business communication Rated as the tool business users rely on the most Messaging server considered critical application 50% business – mission-critical system Yet still it is not taken seriously

14. E-mail – adhoc or managed Structured vs. unstructured information Create, distribute, file and destroy Manage risk Compliance with regulations Log access Authenticity (flight data recorder) Storage (central or personal drives)

15. E-mail – 7 key issues Easy tool Valuable asset Recognised record Need to be accessible Staff leave – information should stay Storage strain Underpins an effective organisation Overload

16. Essential-mail Must consider – Retention, disposal and accessibility – Storage and migration – Security - (confidentiality, integrity and availability) – Ownership – Legal / regulatory requirements – Corporate systems / applications

17. Should UK be nervous? Last year – 5 Wall Street brokerages paid $8.25 million in fines for discarding e-mails related to customer transactions In July, a US court found that UBS Warburg was responsible for paying as much as $300,000 to restore e-mails required for a gender discrimination case

18. Should the academics be concerned? Without processes in place – there will be significant potential for loss of knowledge from the work of today’s scholars’ and to our collective memory. Without preserved knowledge – we might forget about the contributions of Wallace and Tyndall.

19. Preventing the drain Understand the importance of the information and its use Develop & implement a Knowledge Management Strategy Implement effective management Plan and implement policies and procedures Never underestimate the simple e-mail

20. Use e-mail selectively E-mail or not to e-mail – that is the question

21. Thank you! Thoughts, observations or questions?