Transcript
Unknown Speaker 00:00
Welcome, everyone to the longest titled session at the conference, so many files structuring the lifecycle of user files in a museum network environment on prem and cloud. Before we get started, we just wanted to sort of set some expectations of kind of what this session is all about. Hopefully, you know, you registered for a deep dive session, which is actually a new format here at MCN. And so give us a little leeway as we kind of fumble through this process, because we don't have any sort of benchmark to compare it to. But we wanted to make sure it was clear was this is a very much roll up your sleeves session. Yes, there's a panel, we're actually not going to talk a ton. We're actually this is a very interactive session with everyone, we're gonna eventually end up in some breakout groups, and really trying to have some conversation and collaboration amongst everyone in the room to help think through this challenge. So if that's not what you're up for, no, we won't. You know, we won't take it personally if you decide to move on. But we just want to make sure that everyone understood that that we've all talked a little bit about this, we're all at different phases in this in this challenge, but we definitely don't have all the answers. And that's really what this deep dive session is all about. So. So with that, let me talk a little bit of how we got here. And then we'll move into some introductions. So this conversation actually started within the MCN. It SIG. And so if you're not familiar with the special interests, special interest groups that are exist here at the within MCN, there's I think 11 of them that cover subjects like triple if strategy, social media, it. And so if you're not a member, consider becoming a member, the website has a lot of details, Janice is actually the chair of the it six, you can come see Janice afterwards, and she'll make sure to, to get just signed up with this SIG. You may also want to consider it because we're hoping to take all this information and share it, the sixth use base camp as a way to kind of have conversation throughout the year, as well as share resources. And so we're going to hopefully take what comes from today's session and share it there. Anyway, within the last 12 months or so there was some conversations within the within the IT SIG about, you know, file management. And I think the question initially started, as you know, who's still running on premise and who's migrated completely to the cloud? And how did you do it? And what did that look like? And did you use Microsoft OneDrive and all those kinds of questions. And so the four of us, I think we're maybe, I don't know, we maybe said more than, than others. And so at some point, one of us said, you know, good, Matt, and C and community member, we should propose a session where we just brainstorm this because none of us have the answers. And so, unbeknownst to us, MCN was working on this deep dive conversation or deep dive session format. And so here we are. So a little bit of how this is going to work, we're going to quickly run through introductions of who we are, we're going to utilize slideshow if you were in the last session, you maybe have already used at once. And we'll explain exactly how to do that in a second. But we're going to take a poll to try to get a sense of what the room is interested in talking about. And then we're going to break off into some breakout sessions and really kind of talk through these topics, what we're hoping is going to happen is somebody within each of the groups will volunteer to take some notes. Ideally, if you can be taking those notes on some sort of digital device, so you can email it to us afterwards, that would be that would be awesome. And then we're hoping either that person or someone else can, at the end, maybe be a spokesperson for the group and kind of share back the conversation. And then we're really hoping at that point to open the dialogue with everyone. So we're hoping everybody has a chance to, you know, hear about each of the topics, share some thoughts, etc. And really the goals here are that everyone can leave the room today, wherever you are in this sort of lifecycle. With some things you can take home and hopefully act upon and you know, maybe even you know, pie in the sky, maybe we can start defining some best practices for our sector around this. And then ultimately, again, try to drive this conversation for the next 11 and a half months or whatever it is until we all see each other and in Baltimore. So with that, I think we're going to move to introductions, and I think Janice is first on the slide deck.
Unknown Speaker 04:13
Oh, everybody. I'm Janice kradic. I'm head of it at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Like Brian said, when we first started talking about this topic, I was at one of those what do I do now moments, you know, I had been tasked with moving our network files to the cloud and what did that mean and implementing a robust intranet. As more of our staff are moving to working remotely, we needed a better solution for accessing files and Collaborating on documents. And we needed to centralize our online services and file storage and provide better backup and business continuity for the files that lived in the cloud. The challenges I faced were establishing a collaborative space for document development. Oh, authoring documents in real time and tracking and approving, being the main needs of the staff, we were looking for centralized online file storage, you know, Google Dropbox box, you name it, my staff was using it. And when they left, the files just kind of disappeared with them. And we also had limitation of software, we were using Office 365, ie one with on prem applications, and it didn't have some of the functionality that we needed. So we started a process. Our first step was to develop a committee of three, I really say small, small committees to determine the scope of our project. And we want it to involve the staff in discovery and buy in. So we did a survey and 75% of our, our staff responded to our survey, which showed a huge interest in interchange 70 cent of the staff were working away from the office. So we saw a really big need. And 62% were interested in some kind of project management tools to streamline our digital workflows. So we started with small group meetings to identify needs and levels of comfort in file sharing. We had a staff that wanted to give complete access to all our files to everybody. And then we had people on the other end that didn't want to, we're not so open with say, about sharing. Most were open to sharing final documents. But the main concern was confidentiality and miscommunication that would be derived from drafts or too many versions of the same document before they were finalized. So after that, we did a lot of beta testing. Like I said, a lot of our staff were using different online tools. So we tested each platform to determine the pros and cons and how they worked within our organization. Once we settled on Microsoft, we started small, we address staff with the most pressing needs. And currently, our current situation is we are progressing to engaging more staff using OneDrive, it's been a very slow process. We are upgrading to office 365 e three, and I'm learning how to use SharePoint teams. So that's where I am.
Unknown Speaker 07:34
Thank you, Janice. Hi, everyone. Mike behind this podium here. My name is Rebecca Menendez. I'm the Director of Information Services and Technology at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles. And I kind of had a different approach into this problem. I was the beginning of the year sort of browsing around looking at our user file environment. I was working on moving our off site backups from tape to cloud. And the user files are actually about 75% of the data on the network. So I was trying to figure out what to do with this large amount of data. And if I could find a cheaper solution for backups. So what I found on the file servers was as expected a lot of inactive files, abandoned files. But I also found files that were in structures that the users had created related to their past work. So they seem to organized and I thought, Oh, I could just move some of these organized structures to a Archive Server with read only access. And then I could produce, I could set up a less expensive style of backups for those. So another thing I noticed while browsing through the files is that there was a lot of it was a it was clear that there was a lot of like, problems us users were having with sharing across departments. Because I had set up many years ago, a structure of file sharing within on our servers, it was related to the departmental structure of the organization. And as users started working cross departmentally, or they were having trouble finding ways of organizing those files on the network. And so there was a lot of areas that were confusing and difficult to navigate. And so I thought, well, I could fix that I could just create a PART part of the network that's related to cross departmental working groups and set up security groups related to those For those working groups, so I went out to talk to the users and get their buy in with my ideas. And of course, talking to users made everything that much more complex. They were okay with my ideas. They didn't love them, but they didn't want to talk about them. What they wanted to talk about was they had been trying to solve the problems on their own of working cross departmentally. And in cross institutions, and they had been trying out all kinds of tools that they found on the internet. So Google Docs and Dropbox and Basecamp. And I did kind of know they were doing that. But what I didn't know is they were dissatisfied with the results. So they found it, the decentralized nature of all these different tools to be confusing, and an organized and they, they didn't, they couldn't agree on which tool to use for what and so there was like a lot of the same document out there and that kind of thing. So they sort of tasked me with finding them flexible and by environment that had the flexibility, but more structure and sort of unified tools so that they could know what each other was doing within their working group. So all of a sudden, my project changed from trying to just work on off Site Backups, to completely reworking the tools that the artery staff uses for collaboration and file sharing, and developing new workflows. So that's where we are today, we made a really quick decision this summer to go ahead and use Office 365, and SharePoint. And that was because we already we already had it, because we were using Office 365 email. And it was familiar to the users. And also, if you haven't checked the collaboration tools lately, that Microsoft is building, their, their, they're better than they were a couple of years ago. So it seemed like we could, we could make use of them.
Unknown Speaker 12:15
So we've had our key users trained. And we have started up building our first couple SharePoint site sets. And we're just trying to figure out how that works. And I have built the Archive Server and set up the backups for it. And I'm just still working on moving a whole lot of files over to it. And, and next, we're going to start thinking about governance. And also we're going to try to figure out how to do digital records management. And so hopefully, we'll get some great ideas today that I can take back and make use of at the attorney. So I'm gonna pass on to Brian.
Unknown Speaker 13:05
So I'm Brian Thornburg. I'm the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum. I've been there about five years, or a little over five years now. And if you were in the plenary panel, I'm gonna apologize because some of this is a repeat, because it's similar topic. But I have spent most of that time centralizing data throughout the organization, it was very decentralized. It was scattered across, you know, USB, hard drives to NAS devices to, you know, local storage on a server. And, you know, went through the, I guess, typical efforts of, you know, figuring out where that all was, and then how much space do we need ultimately landed on a sand and have moved all that data to that that infrastructure, which has now allowed us to, you know, focus on backups and Dr. And things like that. During that time, we also adopted office 365. I think we actually adopted it pretty early in my my tenure at the Denver Art Museum. And so it has matured a lot since we've been using it. And so we're having a lot of conversations about what role does it have both as a collaboration tool, but also as a storage solution for us? So my biggest challenges are looking at sort of standardizing around some sort of cloud storage solution. I'm assuming I'm not the only one that we have a lot of Dropbox, we have a lot of box, we have a lot of Google Drive, we have a lot of OneDrive. You know, it feels like OneDrive is our solution, because of the nature of the fact that it's free since we're a nonprofit museum. But you know, I'm very open to that conversation with my staff and trying to understand the needs. And then also, what's the right collaboration tool for us. Like I said, Everybody's used to the Google Docs and the shared docs and how well that works. And I think if you were an early adopter of office 365 You didn't see that maturity and functionality within Word and Excel and things like that. I think it's come a long ways in the five years that we've been using it but is it got the right solution for us? Also, then it's the next phase of the lifecycle of what do we do about archiving data. And having this is the first museum I've worked at, I often joke that, you know, we're a museum, we keep everything by nature. And so we keep every file by nature. But we have developed some policies around individual files, sort of the personal drive concept. And as part of our termination process for staff, the form that managers fill out to notify the respective departments like security and it or whatnot that someone's leaving, we do ask a question about personal data. And what what do you want to do, and we have a default, how long we retain it for, we do have some options with a business case on retaining something longer. And it's typically curators been here for 30 years, there's probably some private odds, there's probably some donor relationship data that's in there that we want to maintain, and not just delete. And so we've got a process defined, but it definitely could be better. We have a ton of I believe, orphaned files and this massive share that everyone uses just to share it between departments that need some attention. And that's something that we're definitely struggling with. Security is always something I'm thinking about it just by the nature of my role. What role does encrypted storage have in our environment? How do we better say how do we best manage rights and access to the data? How do we ensure that we're auditing those rights and access PCI and PII data? If you were just in the last session, you heard a little bit about that. And then finally, sustainability is a big challenge. I'm always trying to think, three to four years ahead of kind of where we are today. And what does that look like? And I asked some of the, you know, maybe not so popular questions of if Microsoft tomorrow started charging museums for office 365. What does that look like for us? Do we keep our data there? Do we keep it as an email solution? Can we afford it? Those kinds of things? And so, you know, that's certainly some challenging conversations. And I think, especially when you're just trying to get organized and get things moving, but I want to make sure that we're sort of thoroughly thinking through the reasons that we're doing these things before we do them, just so that we are, you know, as best prepared as we can be. And certainly some of those are crystal ball questions that maybe we're not going to know the answers to. But at least hopefully, we've thought about it a little bit from, you know, if we had to migrate, what might that look like? So those are my challenges.
Unknown Speaker 17:27
Hi, can you hear me okay, hate microphones? Can you hear me? Okay? Hi, I'm Abby Kramer. I'm the Digital Asset Manager and digital archivist in the department of digital infrastructure and emerging technology at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I think I bring a slightly different perspective to this conversation than the rest of my co presenters. I work in it now. But my background is actually in archives. So I maybe have a different sort of approach to records management and have a different perspective as a result of that. And another reason that I think I bring a different perspective is that at the Harvard Art Museum's we actually feel pretty good about where we are with our user files. We feel that way for a couple of reasons. The first is that between April 2018, and April 2019, we migrated from our old network shares to SharePoint Online. The network shares were about 14 years old. So they were really messy, lots of orphaned files, it was terrifying. We did a lot of cleanup. Before the migration, we effectively told the powers that be that we only wanted to migrate active files, no orphaned files, no trash. So we worked really closely with the archivists and records manager at the museums to facilitate that. She and I met with almost the entire staff to educate them about file management best practices, and to really work with them on that cleanup. very hands on and the two of us were really in the weeds with them working on that. And it was a really remarkable opportunity, I think that we were able to really focus resources from throughout the museum's on this file management project, right? Like nobody ever puts that as a priority. So that was pretty cool, pretty unusual and really valuable for us. So that has put us in a really good position. Right now, at this very moment. Our main storage location SharePoint is really clean and tidy. And file management is really fresh in people's minds. So that's one reason that we feel pretty good. The other reason is actually the very unique design of my job. I as I said, I sit in it. I don't know if I said that to say that. I sit in it, but I am half it in half archives. So my it half, among many other things, manages storage and maintenance of our active user files. I also advise on workflows involving file management, which is pretty much every workflow. Just think about it. My boss Is amazing are getting me into those conversations. So anytime a new project is starting, and we're thinking about how we're going to store data, usually in the form of a file of some kind, I'm in that conversation talking about how we're going to manage that and how that that data is going to get stored. And then what's going to happen to it long term. So that puts me right in the middle of the active stages of the file lifecycle. So things like creation, maintenance, use and sharing. The archives, half of me manages preservation, storage, and what inactive files both temporary and permanent. And I also develop and execute preservation and access policies and procedures. So that puts me right in the middle of the inactive stages of the lifecycle, preservation access, reuse destruction. So at the Harvard Art Museums, we have one person me, who's looking at the entire file lifecycle from start to finish and background again, right, which I think is really unusual, I don't know of anywhere else that has something set up that way. So I think gives us a huge advantage. It means that when I'm looking at any individual stage in that lifecycle, I can be planning for all the others are at least considering all of the others. And it also means that we have a lot more control over sort of how all of those things work together. And we can kind of anticipate issues coming at us from down the road. And maybe, maybe if we're lucky, resolve them, or at least try to anticipate how we might resolve them before they become a fire that we have to put out. So we're doing a lot less slapping a bandaid on something and a lot more programmatic solutions to potential issues. So it's amazing, it's great. And I say all of this not to toot my own horn, but toot the horn of my boss who developed the job. It's a really great setup. But that is not to say that we don't have any challenges. That's why I'm here we do have challenges. What are the challenges that I'm really looking at are the challenges that we're facing from this point forward, having completed the migration? Those are things like How soon is too soon to start migrating off additional services, right? We have SharePoint, we want to make that the service that we're using. We want to get rid of Dropbox and OneDrive and all these other things. Well, we can't really get rid of OneDrive because we have SharePoint, but we want to reduce our use of it. So how soon is it? How soon is too soon for us to start doing that? And How late is too late for us to kind of capitalize on the project we've just done? And do it again, basically?
Unknown Speaker 22:27
How do we effectively resolve the perpetual confusion among our staff between OneDrive and SharePoint? And now teams, right? What are these things? We don't know? I don't even really know. So how do we help our staff maintain good file management practices, and kind of keep that momentum from this project? Right. It's all fresh in their minds right now. But it's not going to be, you know, tomorrow, or now. So, so those are the things that are really on my mind right this minute. But we certainly face a lot of challenges during the migration, which I suspect might be more of interest to talk about in this session. Some of those were things like getting institutional buy in for the migration project, getting that to be a priority for the institution. That was a big one, getting our colleagues to see the value of file management, right? Nobody cares about that. I am the only person in the planet who gets excited about that. I'm fine with it. But we had to get other people to at least understand the value of it, even if they weren't excited. We also had a lot of resistance from people about learning a new system, right? Everyone is too busy to learn a new system. So we had to deal with that. We also had trouble. Maybe Maybe other people faced this, we had trouble getting various departments to stick to the deadlines we had said. And we also had some kind of surprising trouble, I thought with people really having a lack of trust in SharePoint or Microsoft in general, because of bad experiences with old versions of SharePoint from like, who knows the 90s. So we had to kind of get over that, which was an interesting challenge that I really had not anticipated. And lastly, I'm also really happy to talk about records management and digital preservation as they relate to all have these other issues. And I will end by embarrassing myself by telling you that I'm really excited to talk about all of these things with you. So without further ado, I will hand things back to I think, Janice to introduce Leto.
Unknown Speaker 24:29
Okay, as Brian said earlier, this deep dive session is group participation. So, we will be breaking out into groups as a result of this survey. And we will discuss the challenges that you we've discussed the challenges that we face now we'd like to hear from you. So pull out those devices. Go to slider.com and the code is files. You can enter as many as you feel that you have done that you are challenging with.
Unknown Speaker 25:03
And maybe a low tech solution, if you don't feel like your challenge has been captured up there. Maybe, you know, this is super informal, shout it out, let's talk about it. See if there's other interest. Again, the goal here is to, you know, all of us to be able to feel like we have gotten some from this session. And so we want to make sure we're, you know, we're taking everybody's thoughts and interests and why they're in this room today into account as best we can. As well as if you feel like any of these need definitions, please. We thought they were straightforward. But you know how that goes.
Unknown Speaker 25:42
Interesting change, management is like, yeah, changes? Or is that just like, anytime?
Unknown Speaker 25:48
I think it's just the general concept of change management. So the apprehension for change the how do you successfully manage it throughout the organization? How do you old habits die hard? And how do you you know, deal with that? All of that?
Unknown Speaker 26:08
Wow, I got a lot of interesting results up there. We were gonna break out in three groups, but we kind of have any 1235 kind of have leastly 50% interest in there. So many people will be
Unknown Speaker 26:30
like 30 to 30 change, like everybody's voted. Yeah. So we couldn't do that. Does everyone feel like your your top one or two is maybe captured in those top? Safe four or five?
Unknown Speaker 26:46
I just don't want to discount
Unknown Speaker 26:47
the folks who are just trying to figure out where to start. Right?
Unknown Speaker 26:51
Yeah. It's an interesting thought, yeah. Maybe, why don't why don't we do this by show of hands, maybe we'll go through these and kind of see i To your point, I want to make sure that we kind of have it's not two people that ended up being in a session or a breakout by themselves. And
Unknown Speaker 27:09
what I mentioned with change management, I know it's very high integrates list, was it a high on the list was on the culture. And we ended up diving into a culture discussion as opposed to change management. Just Just to mention that, like, are we gonna get too far off the rails to talk about change management? When that's institutional? That's a good point. That made me start people all over? Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah, based
Unknown Speaker 27:43
on it, talk about the,
Unknown Speaker 27:46
okay. Okay, so we're gonna, we're gonna start with just the top four, and, you know, feel, feel free to a five, because
Unknown Speaker 27:56
if you really think about all of these changes, management is a piece of all of it. So maybe just make sure that the trainee management conversation is in nature?
Unknown Speaker 28:07
That's a great suggestion. Is everybody comfortable with that? If we Okay, great. Okay, so we're gonna take too many files, record management, institutional archives, collaboration tools, and file sharing governance policies, I guess before we, our thought was, we would have you physically move into these groups and kind of maybe in the corners, again, we're looking for somebody to help take some notes, the four of us are really thinking, we're just going to float around, because we're here, because you're here as well. So we don't have all these answers, but we'll certainly try to provide, you know, some direction as best we can. But again, we're hoping somebody in the group will take some notes. And then either that person or somebody else will also kind of be the voice of the group. Later, we have
Unknown Speaker 28:50
got to say, um, we, we want you to, like brainstorm in these groups, and share your experiences, you know, maybe start by introducing yourself and tell them where you are in this process. And then our aim is to explore the topics in this space, and welcome and amplify the multiple different perspectives that we have. And it's not actually to identify, we may not identify potential solutions today. But we can talk about kind of where we are and where we go from here. And maybe even have to follow up in Basecamp later on.
Unknown Speaker 29:28
And I think as you saw, we do have a lot of time dedicated to this session. And so we are not going to force the session to go to 1230 If it doesn't need to go to 1230. But we also have a lot of time. And so we can, we thought we would start with maybe a half hour in these breakouts, kind of see where we are and then maybe we could switch it up if we feel like people want to continue the conversation. This honestly is supposed to be a collaborative effort with everyone in the room, even though we're the force sitting up here right now. So
Unknown Speaker 29:53
what we do is show up to see who wants to talk about each session. And then if we have too many one session I may have to kind of break you up. How's that sound?
Unknown Speaker 30:02
So too many files? How many? Show of hands if you would, choice into that
Unknown Speaker 30:07
group? Okay, great look at each other.
Unknown Speaker 30:10
Why don't we Why don't we do too many files up here in this corner, kind of near the north near the screen records management and institutional archives? All right. Maybe we'll have you go in that corner back there. Collaboration tools and file sharing. Why don't we have that group go over here by the, I guess, the waters back in that corner? And then governance and policies?
Unknown Speaker 30:38
Three?
Unknown Speaker 30:42
Okay, why doesn't that group meet up here? And maybe a couple of us will join that group to maybe try to even that number out. So any questions? Awesome.
Unknown Speaker 30:53
You can move the chairs around, we'll straighten them out afterwards. Okay, guys, okay, guys. Was that a fun exercise? It seems like there's a lot of conversation going on at least. That's good. So who wants to be the first group to talk? To you? Sure. Go forth.
Unknown Speaker 31:24
To me files. Anybody from that group? I'm happy to, please, that we didn't really think I so I just wrote down. I mean, almost in hindsight, I feel like too many files could have probably just been changed management, as well as just like sprinkled it into every conversation, because I don't know that we we definitely did not come to a solution. That's that's for sure. I mean, somebody in the group said, you know, it's good to hear that, you know, everybody's dealing with the same problem, which I think is kind of what what we came across some of the themes I jotted down, were just, you know, a lot of what we got into was what role does governance and policy play in that, which is ironic, because we weren't covered? We weren't in that conversation, but and who's setting the governance and policy? I think it was, was a big theme in our conversation. Primarily just, you know, there's some, some members of the group who, you know, don't have any authority in their organization. And so they're like, how do I, you know, how am I setting that that, you know, that governance or that policy with with without, you know, managing without any authority, the role of educating staff was, it's certainly another theme throughout, you know, that, you know, no matter how many systems and tools and policies we have in place, you know, there's still that the human factor that we need to take into account, and what does that piece have? Shadow, it was certainly another topic, you know, talking about some of these collaboration tools. And, you know, it is great that these are free solutions, but certainly, you know, it's the free kitten scenario, right? So resource constraints, we talked a little bit about just as we're adopting all of these new tools and solutions, there's a staffing implication for that, as well. And our institutions are certainly not, you know, probably prepared for that. And so, you know, when you when you implement a digital asset management system, you know, doing that without a digital asset manager is, is, you know, not great. And so, you know, how do we tried to address that? We got a little bit into a conversation about the role of a digital asset management system and too many files and what goes there versus, you know, what doesn't? And, you know, I think there were a couple examples of some institutions that have thought through that, and, you know, it's just final versions go into the digital asset management systems. But again, how do you the story was shared that, like, you know, the graphic designers are not great at getting the final version to the digital asset manager to put it into the system. But then how does she force that? Because that's not her department, the manager, the department, you know, we talked a lot about trying to use, you know, whether it's the security side of things, the legal side of things, to try to force some of these conversations and success we've had there, I shared that, like, sometimes I tie things back to donors, and that there's always seems to work or our work always seems there, you know, how can you find these sort of hot button topics that might help get make some headway with some of these issues? And then ownership was also just another big theme and who owns what is in it owning this isn't, you know, the individual business units that are owning this is it, you know, some individual within those units, and I think some of that probably got back to governance and policy. So we went full circle. So others that were part of that conversation, were anything I skipped, or themes or topics that we didn't talk about,
Unknown Speaker 34:40
like too many files is a result of a lack of everything.
Unknown Speaker 34:44
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. start over from scratch. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody else in that group? Anybody that wasn't part of that group. Any thing that resonated anything you want to talk about or
Unknown Speaker 34:58
do you want to move on? One thing we kind of identified in our group that you can play along with that is, both Google Drive and OneDrive. SharePoint have really good document search tools. So even if you do start with too many, getting them up there can help you find what you want a little bit easier than if it's on an old network drive. Not in a dam system. It's not searchable.
Unknown Speaker 35:28
I have a question on that, actually. So say you do that. And you get them all up there, is there a way to identify? You want to get coffee? So then you can grab a bunch of stuff, but
Unknown Speaker 35:42
there are a lot of services that do that. I haven't found it and OneDrive yet. But there are other software's that will search. And they'll do it on network drives as well.
Unknown Speaker 35:55
SharePoint, but sometimes you've
Unknown Speaker 35:58
got a copy here, a couple here. Every department has their own copy. And nobody knows well, it's mine actually the same as yours? Or is it different?
Unknown Speaker 36:08
Yeah, my
Unknown Speaker 36:11
personal tree sizes.
Unknown Speaker 36:15
dupe Guru is really good, too.
Unknown Speaker 36:20
Yeah, yeah, to the cloud. So we want to get rid of it all on premise before we want to get rid of duplication on premise people.
Unknown Speaker 36:27
And maybe that's a conversation for file sharing, and having shared drives instead of everybody having their own copy.
Unknown Speaker 36:35
Yeah, dupe Guru is really good for local files. And one thing that I do sometimes is upload things to SharePoint, and then sync them locally and run Dooper on them. So
Unknown Speaker 36:49
pro tip I think it's Mac and PC, but I'm not totally sure.
Unknown Speaker 36:57
Anything else on the too many files? I think the question of why why are we keeping this came up? In all of this, you know, and really drill into the root of is it just, you know, ignorance? Or is it you know, just cuz because we're museums, we keep everything, you know,
Unknown Speaker 37:10
what's why do we really need is cheap. It's cheap to think about. It's just cheaper
Unknown Speaker 37:15
to buy it drives? Sure. And,
Unknown Speaker 37:19
yeah, well, it's not a pile of banker's boxes sitting in the corner, and somebody has to look at it every day and go, we should do something about
Unknown Speaker 37:24
that. Was there any conversation about how to get away from too many problems? For Steve? Yeah, approaches, or, I mean, I toyed with the idea of just taking off the network files and making them read only. And then saying, if you want to save something, you've got to save it in the new platform. I don't know how much of low back that would cause
Unknown Speaker 37:47
a lot to think about. But it just seems like there's got to be some
Unknown Speaker 37:59
process not going to that extreme, but suddenly, randomly, I haven't wrapped my head fully around how to do
Unknown Speaker 38:05
that. But yeah, so there's only one thing that we're talking about very,
Unknown Speaker 38:10
very loosely, apparently, it's that putting a putting a cap on like department chairs, right? You get two terabytes and after that, it's going to cost the money to expand it so it forces them to clean or pay it's not the greatest solution but it's a long way to trauma church because of loss of their loved ones that don't have good solutions. So this is the best solutions just right here saying googling put it all in one place cert make it searchable and pay for when historian and maybe that there's any other solution is too much overhead
Unknown Speaker 38:42
in the back
Unknown Speaker 38:44
just as part of a production peripheral team storage printers. A beggar my system mostly hasn't like where do you think we work we create constantly constantly don't check my story like figure out if infrastructure that works for my work
Unknown Speaker 39:03
planner for you to plan accordingly. Right? You can ask for the space ahead of time and say we're gonna create this and that allows your storage team to provision storage and you know, rice and all those things are things that we don't find it
Unknown Speaker 39:24
well, we're collections well, actually. You have to make sure you do have we've talked about in too many files. Has anybody looked at where they expect charge where they expect to be in storage using five in two years with 4k and all that stuff?
Unknown Speaker 39:40
That's a really good point. That conversation on my team, like the collection of okay, I've started planning but my IT team are so swamped and under resourced. They can't put together an infrastructure plan for here. I like digging into storage like
Unknown Speaker 39:57
you're gonna go out and buy a couple terabyte hard drive put on your desk no
Unknown Speaker 40:07
makes me my head is exploding
Unknown Speaker 40:10
right now, if you get some idea what you're doing, and then you got to find it, you say we're a museum, we're expensive, messy business, we have to do what we're doing, you gotta come up with another 1050 100 quarter million dollars in the next couple of years, there's really no way around it. And then everybody else, maybe not happy, but at least the problem. But that's fine. It's nice to know that you're creating all this stuff. And it's important that you have to convince him or not just the IP guys,
Unknown Speaker 40:46
I've definitely done that. I've gone to my executive management and show and tried to show the value of a house of cards in the burning building. Election wasn't just everything else. And they got it. They definitely got it, like the look of fear in their eyes. was palpable. I was like, Yes. And then budget season came and I asked for an asset manager. And that's because money is a numbers game was something that is not, you know, physical.
Unknown Speaker 41:24
You can tell what you won't get that, right, I don't have this person, then we're not going to do X, Y, Z.
Unknown Speaker 41:30
Okay. Let's move on to the next group. So don't run out of time. That's okay. Records management. Is that where we're
Unknown Speaker 41:39
going? Okay. I think we've talked a lot about that first step to start writing policy and identifying the types of clients you have. You talked about whether you put the onus on the carpet to identify it, or if you look at things kind of holistically, I was writing things down like this is a working file presentation files temporary and active. In Progress. Some institutions really don't want to like deal with them, like trying to manage what the files which is there. And that's a headache, but the thing I'm trying to deal with the working file. And then what are the storage implications of those types of files. I brought up the I'm looking into, like a local cloud hybrid storage solution. Like now, it takes some costs with email at the table pulling things down from the cloud.
Unknown Speaker 42:42
I record, it took away that having a record standard policy that has an ROI would actually save save you save all of us money, by way of including whatnot, even whatnot, just for giving reasons for not just keeping everything, just sort of everything.
Unknown Speaker 43:03
You see, yeah, it solves the too many files problem for you, basically,
Unknown Speaker 43:09
I'm just going to share some other quotes. I know keeping everything and not knowing where it is not being able to find it is essentially the same as not keeping it at all. Around perhaps an idea for any of us is to write a grant to have a records manager come in for up to a year and create a policy for your organization or organizations. And I was trying to kind of pull out how to get started or tie back to where we started. Where do I start? And one thought was, you could start with your policy breaking news and it gets created. And we have we inherit all this history that called the policy list, pile of files. And that seems really overwhelming. But perhaps they start with your policy for speaking up as creative as having a policy. That or that we really discussed how to go back or to go back and how to apply that to all the historical stuff. I had, I had heard and I'm still waiting to hear perhaps anyone have a great success story on using photos on your file server because in our group, we didn't really we heard some organizations before that, that nobody really liked it or nobody was like kind of working within that. Half a week. Society of American Archivists are discovered as some good resources online. Yeah, that was what I was
Unknown Speaker 44:31
talking about storage Part One thing that has just kind of occurred in my institution. So I wouldn't imagine that the museum is because of the sensitivity and the material that ends up being a white person in each department who all requests for content has to go through a lot like a lot with the official management but because each department is kind of held accountable that if their content goes out into the world somewhere I don't suppose to be there. All After they made it, why is that somewhere even though it wasn't the person like the content creator who disputed it. So, because of that kind of fear, like things like communication, but people who want to use that content, end up contacting the content creator and the content creators, and for myself, I sell X five websites, I can make sure that wherever the streaming link is from down or wherever the file is, I like follow up with the way you put the files or duplicate it, you know, always just come back to me if you need it in a moment,
Unknown Speaker 45:38
like that. So you guys talk about when you've got the policy, who's writing that policy? Is it his job? Is it legal job is the question, because in my mind, it shouldn't be all three, but
Unknown Speaker 45:56
have very strong feelings about this. Record Management Policy is not eyeties job. It's really not. It's just not. And it's just really nice. And but unfortunately, it falls to us, because we're the ones who are dealing with all of this stuff, right? It's in our way, we have to get rid of it. But I mean, there there are records managers in the world. And there are lots of resources out there. If you have records manager on your staff, then they should be the one doing it. Right? Obviously, many of us don't. If you have an archivist on staff, archivists, and records managers are siblings, if not twins, so talk to them.
Unknown Speaker 46:39
I'm writing the policies, are they enforcing the policies, they should
Unknown Speaker 46:42
be doing both that that should be that and and they should be doing it under consultation with legal people, like if you have a general counsel, or whomever I don't, you know, different size institutions have lots of different versions of these things. But at the very least, I want to second, Sarah's comment about SAA, they have tons of resources online. There's a whole section of the website about records management, tons of examples of records management, or record schedules, rather, they will set you in the right direction. If you find that you have to create a records management policy yourself, please go there first, don't just wing it. And it'll at least give you some ideas of how to start and what you're looking for and what you're trying to do. The policies apply to the marketing department, for instance, so that yeah, it's everything, it's everything. Yeah, I have a little different
Unknown Speaker 47:32
sight on that. I think they they seem to be mission focused organization, and with the records manager information
Unknown Speaker 47:38
to guide
Unknown Speaker 47:39
as to what the best practices are, I don't think it's the task of the record center as a whole to do with organization because they wouldn't be in that
Unknown Speaker 47:52
overall arching, overarching view.
Unknown Speaker 47:54
And they might not be able to implement for some people
Unknown Speaker 47:58
to comply with. And that's probably why I went through the department and our marketing,
Unknown Speaker 48:03
I would recommend the leadership team with the records managers
Unknown Speaker 48:07
and help to try to make sure that
Unknown Speaker 48:09
they're doing the right things.
Unknown Speaker 48:10
I'm pretty company one time that had they have quota, and they have the guidelines,
Unknown Speaker 48:18
or you know, what should be stored on tape, you know, at some point, and they would send out quarterly reminders, and then the company actually had a cleanup afternoon where nobody could work but everybody has to clean up their files would have a recall and online you know, cleanup day work. You know, because people need that they need to be told they have to take the time to do that definitely
Unknown Speaker 48:52
needs to be a directive from management that is important.
Unknown Speaker 48:56
Our company we have this thing once a year called fall. And people just drive in GM stuff. The sad thing is actually they used to give I give God's whoever does the most stuff and I don't know, stuff on the network and then a month later I guess what they're calling it
Unknown Speaker 49:25
but we only have it on home user folders. And the only reason we have in our home users folder is because we know chances are that file exists and divisions of shared folders so by putting a folder in a home folder, we basically kind of push them to make the to put the data and way everybody can see it all the way now is
Unknown Speaker 49:49
keeping all that vacation
Unknown Speaker 49:57
system at least abnormally Have a lot of mission driven content creation activities, enormous storage footprint. I also just think like, it's something that we're trying to kind of flip around where if people become aware of their, what they're creating has a cost, that they don't that they're not always having to react, they have graphics so that they can strategically think about it. Because there's a lot of time into it like about sustainability of file formats. And like, what the kind of shared thinking is about like, what is the master file for this video that time in your YouTube? Now? What is its importance to the institution? How many years do they want it to be accessible, and so it kind of ties into these learners, because I, I feel like anybody who's repeatedly hitting their forehead, it's almost like a great list that we like to have all in a room to help help us make a policy get round around what's being created here.
Unknown Speaker 51:00
Okay, let's go on to the next group, just a value of time. Collaboration tools, file sharing.
Unknown Speaker 51:10
So we stayed within our brief and didn't talk about it was a really good discussion, a really good group of IT people and users. And some of the key things that came out from experience is a good pilot groups for a new tool is incredibly valuable, that they're open to new ideas. So they experiment and they give you really good feedback. So you can make changes as you as you move to taking it across the organization. That there are a lot of coauthoring limitations when you look at on prem versus cloud, office 365 online applications versus the desktop applications. And weighing staying in one environment versus spreading out. One person talked about how my boss was going to save in multiple locations. Lack of literacy, this tool is going to save you time, but then also how much time it's going to take to train, especially in a museum environment of people who are coming from typewriters and carbon copy and all that and just data and digital is not at their wheelhouse. And then, if a department is already using a tool really successfully, is to then take that to a you know, it works, it was maybe outside of it, but it's a good tool and then adopt it and take it across the organization, you already have a champion that says this works. And then as you go to Users, there have been some IT departments that say, Oh, here's this tool, use it. They will what problem does it solve? How is it actually going to help don't just build a tool for your users, talk to your users, find out what problems need to be solved, and then solve the problem instead of just hey, we've got a swinging tool, and it does these awesome things. Talking about the file side, which we kind of talked a little bit about two new files and dead files and who knows who the owner of these files. And as you get file sharing, whether it's in one spot or five spots, and having permission controls, whether that's SharePoint or Google to restrict editing. So it's just a view only have a place where they can then take it down and edit it for themselves and set people editing a template that everyone's supposed to have access to. And now everyone sees that reference budget. And then thinking about space, a lot of plans for business. Some are unlimited. Some are so large for smaller organizations that you don't need to be concerned about space, but as we get into 4k and 8k space, balloons pretty quickly and just planning ahead of time that your cloud location is going to grow with. Thank you. Okay. Any other comments from the other groups? Awesome group. Copying, right. I mean,
Unknown Speaker 54:52
what do you mean by that? Because sometimes what happens is you have to keep the active copy that is an access by everybody to Want to save copies work? I know. So rely on you just being able to get it if something happens to this backup and restore
Unknown Speaker 55:14
your backup, you're using Office 365 to do something like Bing. Yeah. And that also comes down to records management and policies and retention. Right. Right. So
Unknown Speaker 55:26
what is it three years in one day? Question I haven't came up with and he started talking about that is is is, is office 365, the replacement for Dropbox in terms of sharing large documents to outside vendors, like our publishing people, when the giant files is I'm looking for more and more drivers to centralize themselves.
Unknown Speaker 55:59
And then think in I was in that group, and we had one person who is using Box real successfully and one person using Google Drive real successfully, and everybody else was very much Microsoft shop. So I think it doesn't matter which platform you use as much as just, you know, centralizing on one and doing the education, everything else that we talked about using
Unknown Speaker 56:22
Box or Dropbox and then moved over 365, they're going to drop their subscriptions to those. Because Oh, 365 has everything you need. Yes. Another checkbox. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 56:34
My manager, going back to what I mentioned earlier, is when we moved from Dropbox to office 365, we use the Cloud Sync tool. So we let people operate in both environments, especially in the exhibits department. Why? Because they had the emails with the links to the Dropbox file, and they didn't have Blink. So they started migrating and setting up the links to the office 365 account, and then doing that. So they were allowed to work in the duality until we pulled their rights to Dropbox. And it made that move a little bit easier, because they could figure out how both
Unknown Speaker 57:03
what the positives and negatives looks like, it was clear that he was going to at this college critical use journey. So
Unknown Speaker 57:09
I have a question for you. What was the business decision or technical decision within two to three license? Mainly, like we're on E one. And when you use E one to collaborate in real time or co author, there are some issues with that, because you're using Word Online at that point. And it was causing some people to like open a document and save a copy instead of working on the same day. And sometimes not showing up as your co author, you know, you don't see both people. Yeah, yeah, so that was a three you download, you can download a local copy, too. And it gives you more of those co authoring and more features like them. And we do a lot of like advanced features in Word. So people will not be happy with just Word Online,
Unknown Speaker 58:04
you go to eat three for everybody, or just full time staff.
Unknown Speaker 58:07
We're in the process right now where we've only gone live people just to kind of test it out. But we will probably go most of our staff. And we thought about like, like housekeeping and volunteer library volunteers and something like that we thought about leaving them one, but they can't access online documents. So until we get all of our shared document tation like that to the cloud, they have to have ie three accounts until we and then maybe we can reevaluate it that time and then lower the number.
Unknown Speaker 58:41
So if you want to do anti threat protection, you're going to need a three or a three, but you probably you might look into a three to
Unknown Speaker 58:51
one. Okay, let's go ahead and quickly with the other last group.
Unknown Speaker 58:54
Okay, governance and policies. So we went around and sort of talking about what are situations where many of us never had never done policies, or they are unevenly implemented, Are there standards in some areas, but not in others. And we talked a little bit about why these
Unknown Speaker 59:15
problems arose. And often
Unknown Speaker 59:17
that's because of the lack of good communication between it and the rest of the organization. People with different levels of understanding. We had a good conversation about needing to implement these policies at the point of hire, so onboarding an HR and getting those folks to understand and, and get on board. There are some horror stories of people emailing policies that were never rented and you know, all that sort of thing. So go with understanding the importance of actually communicating that information accurately. You know, it's important to do from from the very beginning. In many cases there was there were problems with understanding roles and responsibilities. For example, With the issue of like the records manager develops the policy, but then they may not have the authority to enforce the policy. So making sure that the right people are at the table to make these decisions. Often, there's a lack of understanding on the part of senior management and the sort of desire to just buy something to solve the problem, rather than what we believe at the systemic issues. There's also a problem of over talking these issues, that there can be many fragmented committees, you know, where many people discuss a lot of things, but nothing actually gets implemented. Because at the end of the day, people who are creating those files are great busy with their various jobs. And so this learning process of changing behavior doesn't actually have anything recommendations, or maybe there can be problems with with people reporting to different leaders and upper management. So in one organization, we talked about digital, and it will be put into two different people. And so there's a need to have lateral conversations among the departments to make sure that these functionalities actually work, which is challenging in that environment. And then we had a good conversation about talking about the policies that we do have in the ITC, and how it might be helpful to have a a set of recommendations of like, what policies exist, what elements are there, I understand there's already a library, but it might be helpful to move it forward to, to actually identifying the elements of a good set of policies. And then we talked a little bit about how to sort of understand where the pain points are and how to understand for this specific issue rather than a symptom, and then reschedule it up process improvement workshops, and
Unknown Speaker 1:01:54
how that can be done in the input from the rest of the crowd. Awesome. Very good group. Oh, sure. I mean, thank you this I hopefully, you got something out of this, you know, however long we've been together two plus hours, I guess, almost going on. So we if you those of you that took notes, if you could make sure to email it to Janice is genius. Just email her a copy. Oh, she's
Unknown Speaker 1:02:28
just a brand new rebranded. So if you're not in the ITC,
Unknown Speaker 1:02:35
yeah, I think I feel like we're we've we've just sort of scratched the surface here. And hopefully this conversation can continue. And I know, Janice has done an excellent job as the chair of the SIG to try to, you know, we try to do a monthly webinar of some type knowledge share. In fact, we have a great recording of Abby's from a couple months ago that I would highly recommend you listen to from an archivist perspective, because I think it's it's super valuable, but maybe this could lead some of that conversation. So please engage with us in Basecamp, or engaging us through the CIG on Basecamp. And we have some time, so we'll stick around if there's anybody wants to chat more. But thank you all so much. This went really well. If you have any feedback on this deep dive conversation session idea, please let us know we'll make sure it gets back to the conference organizers. Because I think they're looking to us to sort of provide some of that since this was a little bit of an experiment and see how this goes for future.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:24
Make sure you do the review or the the evaluation
Unknown Speaker 1:03:28
review survey. Anyway, thank you all very much. Thank you