Packrats Unite

January 13, 2015 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Packrats Unite

Here we are at the beginning of a new year. Resolutions aside, it is great time to take inventory of your records and evaluate your records management plan. This suggestion came to us from the Green Bay Gazette in their article, “Purging the paper from your office — and your life.”

I confess. I am a packrat, hoarder, collector, or whatever you want to call it. I inherited it honestly from my mother and grandmother. When it comes to work, I call myself “IT’s nightmare and Legal’s dream”. I save every digital file and email. I use more than my share in storage, but when the general counsel comes over looking for “that thing we did a couple of years ago about the you know and the other things” – I have it and it is found with minimal effort.

I don’t pretend to set myself up as the perfect example of indexing and findability – not by a long shot. First of all, I am not a walking taxonomy. And we all know that the true way to achieve findability is through a strong taxonomy to index metadata against for future searches.

Knowing what to keep and what to throw away is a decision based on a number of factors, and those will differ from one organization to another.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.