mybestdocs   Rick Barry, Content Manager

What's that IT term mean?   

Richard E. "Rick" Barry, Editor and Content Manager, Email: info [at] mybestdocs [dot] com                     

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself."  Eleanor Roosevelt. 

 


N.B. This is an unsolicited recommendation to public or private sector managers, currently planning or implementing digital archives and records management or heritage programs, who are in the market for excellently trained digital curation specialists or digital archivists. I recommend that organizations with internships or short/long-term vacancies give serious consideration to the outstanding crop of fellows in and coming out of the University of North Carolina  (Chapel Hill) Educating Stewards of Public Information Infrastructure (ESOPI2)) dual graduate degree program. See the current lineup of ESOPI2 participants  for bios and further information.  I've been serving on the project Advisory Board for its first phase and currently second phase through 2014, which has given me the opportunity of meeting with and listening to several of these participants. They are undertaking research and internships in such areas as cloud computing, geophysical, texting and instant messaging systems and recordkeeping implications. (E.g., see report by Nicholas Ring in Recent Content below.) For information on participant availability,  contact Professor Helen Tibbo or Cal Lee, Asst. Professor and program PI and Co-PI respectively. RB   

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Recent Content @ MyBestDocs  

Guest Authors (Further description on the Guest Authors page)


  • Gregory Sanford, former Vermont State Archivist, final essay in "Voice from the Vault series: "In Search of Bunny Piper"

  • Nicholas Ring, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), participant in Educating Stewards of Public Information Infrastructure (ESOPI2) dual graduate degree fellowship program. "Best Practices for Electronic Communications Usage in North Carolina: Text and Instant Message," March, 2012, published here with the kind permission of the author and Principal Investigators of the ESOPI2 program. This report was written as part of a consulting study of text messages as records for the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. See the Guest Authors page for more information.

  • I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era, Society of American Archivists (SAA), Chicago, August 2011, pp. 379, Christopher A. (Cal) Lee, Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ed. This tightly-knit set of chapter offerings by an outstanding line-up of 10 authors: Adrian Cunningham, Cathy Marshall, Sue McKemmish, Kristina Spurgin, Tom Hyry and Rachel Onuf, Leslie Johnston, Susan Thomas, Christopher A. (Cal) Lee and Robert Capra. For book purchasing link or to view the Table of Contents, Editor's Introduction, Author Bios, and Index, go to the Guest Authors section under Lee

  • Archivist of the US (AOTUS) blog. This is not a guest author offering, but rather a notice to colleagues of the availability of this excellent resourse.

  • Bruce Bruemmer's paper "Brown Shoes in a World of Tuxedos: Corporate Archives and the Archival Profession," in the Guest Authors section has been translated into Japanese at the request of the Records Management Society of Japan, translation courtesy of Takashi  Asahi. It has been added to the Guest Authors section.  

  • "Preserving Digital Memory at the National Archives and Records Administration of the U.S.," by Kenneth Thibodeau, presentation at the "Workshop on Conservation of Digital Memories Second National Conference," Bologna, Italy, 20 November 2009. This is an unpublished paper that is published here with the kind permission of the author. The author plans to publish in a longer version of the paper at a later date. At time of this publication, it reflected the latest published update on the status of the ($350,000,000+ to-date) ERA system. (Please see Guest Authors Section under Ken Thibodeau's papers.)

  • Podcast: "Government 2.0 Taskforce with Adrian Cunningham & John McDonald" (41 mins). Download provided by Julie McLeod (Professor in Records Management at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K).& Project Director AC+erm research project www.northumbria.ac.uk/acerm as part of a monthly podcast series on the records management issues affecting organisations and professionals today, from Northumbria University's School of Computing, Engineering & Information Sciences. http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/. (Please see Guest Authors Section under Cunningham or McDonald for more  details.)                                                                                        

  • "Service-oriented architecture and recordkeeping," by Barbara Reed, Director of Recordkeeping Innovation Pty Ltd, an Australian based consulting company serving the pan-Asian region. Barbara is well known to professionals and ARM practitioners in Australasia, other Pacific countries, other Commonwealth countries and North America. See above description in the listing of awards papers and further comments and the paper in the Guest Authors section. 

  • "Records and Representations," by Geoffrey Yeo, Lecturer in Archives and Records Management at University College London. This paper was given at the Conference on the Philosophy of the Archive in Edinburgh in April 2008. 

  • Understanding Data and Information Systems for Recordkeeping, by Philip C. Bantin, University Archivist, Indiana University, Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2007. Well known for his leadership in the field of electronic records, including his leadership of the Indiana University Electronic Records Project, Bantin explores content management systems, data warehouses, relational databases — the ways an institution can organize and store its information that are changing rapidly. He provides a comprehensive guide to the new technologies that can help us better organize vital documents and information for preservation, search, and retrieval. 


 

    Selected Content by Rick Barry 

 

 

Our house...our family archive 

 

This is probably the only discussion on this site that is not about information and records management, because it is about my home; but that is also in so many ways a precious family archive. It is about my own and my wife's thinking processes as we thought seriously about the home aspects of retirement. Are you thinking about retiring in the next few years? Baby boomer? Last kid in college? Otherwise ready to downsize your life style without giving up on quality of living—in fact improving on that? Read media stories about Rick Barry's and wife Linda Cox's recently built "retirement home", an alternative to a 50+ year-old only retirement community. "A Turning Tide, One Couple’s Practical Dream Home Is Ahead of Its Time" by Christy Pagans in the Spring 2006 issue of Washington SPACES magazine, Trish Donnelley, Editor. The home was previously reviewed by architect and syndicated columnist, Katherine Salant in, "A House for All Seasons," September 13, 2002. This is a new 1-level home designed by Rick and his wife with assistance from an architect using multi-generational (Universal Design) architectural design features, though we weren't aware of that until we were about half way through the project. The house was built by Gruver & Cooley, custom builders for the past 100 years, originally in Arlington, VA, now in Leesburg, VA. RB

 


OTHER RECENT CONTENT

 

Check out Archivist of the US (AOTUS) Blog Site. Very good use of Web2 technology for lite but interesting and often provocative ideas and innovations. Reader feedback invited.


 

Selected Government Accountability Office Reports re: National Archives and Records Administration 

(For a full listing of  reports go to GAO Reports and Testimonies)

 


IN MEMORIAM: Francis X. McGovern: Rembrancer, Recordkeeping Advocate and Practitioner, and Friend — Extraordinaire. See: Frank McGovern: Reflections, by many friends and colleagues, provided by his great friend and then-IBM colleague, Bill Neale.  

 

 


 

On a Personal Note...

 

On Personal Electronic Recordkeeping. Barry, R, E, "Barry Family Journal", a personal and ongoing exercise in personal electronic records. This very drafty journal is placed in a larger context of my ancestry, though still very sketchily right now. Largely because of a combination of a quite complete scrap book kept by my mother, Mary Witherell Barry, and the excellent research facilities and resourced found at the National Archives and Records Administration (and its outstanding naval archivist staff) in Washington, D.C. and College Park, MD, it thus far focuses mainly on the World War II period as witnessed by my oldest, now deceased, brother, Charles B. Barry (Ensign through Commander). It cover his role and experiences beginning with December 7, 1941 when as a young naval gunnery officer on liberty at the Moana Hotel on Waikiki beach, Oahu, then Territory of Hawaii when the attack on Pearl Harbor took place and the days thereafter. Also included as an appendix is a virtual copy of an extraordinary and revealing, hand-written letter home that he wrote one month to the day before the historic attack. It demonstrates that a young Ensign seems to have had a greater awareness of the coming storm than some far higher superiors in the chain of command in headquarters centers at Pearl Harbor. The original of this letter has been gifted to The National World War II Museum, 945 Magazine Street New Orleans, LA 70130, where it is now accessible to all researchers and the public more generally. See SAA Business Archives Newsletter article, "Giving it away…about giving it away," by Rick Barry, on the author's experience in searching out and arranging to gift my brother's original November 7, 1941 letter to The National World War II Museum. For a brief article on the author's experience in searching out and selecting an appropriate institution and arranging for a deed of gift of my brother's original November 7, 1941 letter, see SAA Business Archives Newsletter article, "Giving it away…about giving it away," by Rick Barry.For more on this and other references on personal electronic recordkeeping, click here

 


 

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Richard E. "Rick" Barry, Editor and Content Manager, MyBestDocs.com

 ARLINGTON, Virginia, USA.  Email: info at mybestdocs dot com