Paper overflow in the office
I really do not have any questions for this week. Rather I have a few examples and thoughts on the readings from my experience in the wonderful world of work.
Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg’s article The Character, Value, and Management of Personal Paper Archives made me think a lot of my work in my current and previous offices. I used to work for a fairly large law firm in Boston. I worked there for two years and during that time the V.P. would always talk about how we were “going digital.” All legal and court documents would be scanned and placed on the network for easy access and that the originals would be kept on site but rarely used. It was wishful thinking and it never happened. Needless to say we often had problems with misplaced documents. Thinking back it was actually really bad. We were supposed to make copies of all legal documents, because if we had to send a document back to the court we would have a copy. Well, not everyone did this. So we would send the original back, then need to look at a copy, which we did not have. Not the best scenario. So having a digital archive of all legal documents would have been extremely helpful.
This article also made me think of how people tend to keep more paper than they probably need to. At my old job my desk was filled with documents I may have looked at once and just stuffed in the drawer. So I was not very surprised with the counterintuitive findings of holding onto documents. I was also guilty of having numerous copies of manuals or instructions in my desk that I look at infrequently. When I would clean my desk I would think do I have a use for this, more often I would say yes, even if I rarely referred to something. So my desk was usually filled with documents I really did not need. I guess people have a tendency to save things, which in the corporate world can take up a lot of space and time as well. After all cleaning your desk while it is useful, it is also a waste of the company’s time. Ideally one would know right away what to do with a document i.e. save it or throw it out.
February 13th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
So, I’m curious how you’d connect your work experiences with your practices as a historian - do the same things apply w/r/t the hoarding of paper? Is the “myth of the paperless office” as pervasive in the history world of preservation and digital archives as it is in the legal realm? Why?