AN EXCELLENT INFORMATION SOURCE: THE RESOURCE SHELF

Gary Price has created one of the most rich and valuable Web Logs I have seen, called the ResourceShelf. Every Thursday, I get a reminder message to look at this excellent Blog. While he provides a great variety of information, most is focused on matters that would be of interest to librarians, archivists, records managers, and other knowledge, information, and records aficionados...like you and me. Check it out!

--Posted by Roger Winters, Chapter President

FROM ARMA INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENT-ELECT DAVE McDERMOTT: FACTS AND ADVICE

[This item submitted by Susan Priebe, Chapter Secretary.]

President-Elect Dave McDermott was a guest at the joint Bellevue/Eastside and Greater Seattle chapter meeting on November 6, 2003. Toward the end of Dave’s presentation, he shared some very interesting statistics from Reuters with the attendees, as well as his thoughts on what he believed to be important aspects for us to consider in our future as records professionals. Here are the statistics:

• 75% of records are still in paper form
• 15% of all organizational revenue is spent on the creation, management, and distribution of information
• 49% feel that they are unable to handle the amount of information received
• 60% of people’s time is spent working with records
• 38% believe they waste substantial time looking for information
• 48% believe the Internet is the primary cause of information overload

Here are Dave’s thoughts on our challenges, what we must know, and the expansion of our skills.

Current Challenges:
• Manage all types of information, physical and virtual
• Management of electronic information
• E signatures and digital coding
• Privacy issues
• HIPAA
• Sarbanes Oxley

What We Must Know:
• Must understand technology as a tool
• Must develop policies and procedures that support the strategic direction of the organization
• Be able to create and maintain record programs and services
• Store and protect information and knowledge

Expanding Our skills:
• Ability to think strategically
• Exceptional personal interaction skills
• Ability to manage multiple projects
• Ability to think conceptually
• Exceptional verbal and written skills
• Understand digital systems
• Know how to integrate multiple types of information systems

FROM REGION COORDINATOR DEAN KOGA -- "WELCOME TO ANOTHER ARMA YEAR!"

Congratulations are in order for Mark Hoffman and the Puget Sound Chapter for winning the “Best Newsletter” and “Chapter of the Year” awards for a medium-size chapter during the awards program at the recent ARMA International Conference in Boston. The Puget Sound members have invested a lot of time working on RIM and community projects to bring these honors home to their chapter and to our region for the last three or four years. I congratulate all of the members in the Puget Sound Chapter for their commitment to ARMA.

At the conference, the ARMA International Educational Foundation (AIEF) presented speaker John Montana, J.D., and his research project, Legal Obstacles to E-mail Message Destruction. This project was the first grant as a result of the newly formed educational foundation and can be accessed here in PDF format. If you would like to see more research projects, such as this one, I urge you to make a donation to the ARMA International Educational Foundation. Best of all, your contributions are tax-deductible. You can also pledge $100 for five years and become a Legacy 5/100 donor.

The conference included some excellent sessions on E-mail, E-Records, RIM software, Sarbanes-Oxley, XML, electronic risks, records retention, spoliation of evidence, and finally the mock trial. The vendor exhibits had solutions to our records management, e-mail sorting, shredding, records storage, and scanning needs.

During our region luncheon, Greater Anchorage members Renee Salvucci and Larry Hayden distributed an attractive brochure for the ARMA 2004 Great Northwest Region Conference, “Real Adventures in Records Management,” May 17-19, 2004, in Anchorage, Alaska. Mark your calendars and get ready for some excellent speakers, educational programs, and spectacular sites including the Phillips 26 Glacier Cruise.

With the ARMA year in full swing, many chapters have already presented their members with some innovative programs and seminars, so I urge you all to take advantage of these networking and educational opportunities.

Finally, if you have any questions or comments about how our ARMA region is doing, do not hesitate to contact Dee Wise, Leslie Sturgeon or me, Dean Koga, and we will do our best to address your issues or make changes.

Have an exciting ARMA year and a peaceful holiday season.

Dean Koga
Region Coordinator

LEARN ABOUT BLOGS - AND AN EXCELLENT MONTHLY NEWSLETTER - HERE
by Roger Winters, Chapter President

Scroll down, once you've opened the Internet Resources Newsletter: Issue 111, December 2003, to the section entitled BLOGORAMA. There, you will find links to several informative articles about Web logs and related subjects. This is classic Internet stuff! Links lead to more and more detail, as you please -- you "drill down" to find what interests and informs YOU.

I have subscribed to the Internet Resources Newsletter for years. From the United Kingdom, it's got lots of content of interest to information professionals like us. You may want to set aside a little time for this one -- it can use up a good amount of your time as it leads you to information resources you may not have heard of before.

From this issue, my favorite item is the search engine called "Mooter." It appears to be Australian. It's way of presenting search results is quite interesting.

Enjoy learning about Blogs!

SEATTLE CHAPTER EXPERIMENTS WITH COMMUNICATION METHODS
by Roger Winters, Chapter President

In June of this year, I wrote about change and challenged our chapter to review the things we do, to re-evaluate them, to consider how they are related to the Mission, Vision, and Values of ARMA International.

The "traditional" way for an ARMA chapter to communicate with its members has been through a monthly newsletter. We are all familiar with mailed newsletters--perhaps you have had the chance to be involved in producing one.

Newsletter technology has certainly changed! I remember using mimeograph and hectograph systems to produce and print newsletters in high school, college, church, and other groups in which I was involved. Word processing and the ability to have newsletters printed relatively quickly and easily changed all of that. As you know, our chapter moved away from the printed, postally-mailed newsletter to a PDF-formatted electronic newsletter posted on our Chapter Web Site (examples here).

Electronic mail and the Internet have given us a dramatic expansion of the tools we have for communicating within our chapter. When just a few of us had e-mail or Internet access, during the '90s until just a few years ago, we could not use these electronic media very successfully. Today, it seems that every member of the Greater Seattle Chapter has an e-mail address and, presumably, access to the Internet.

(It is essential today that a records and information management professional have these tools, not because they are "modern" or "cool," but because they have become part of the fabric of how business is done in today's world. If you do not have e-mail and Internet access yet, [you might be reading this as a printout someone brought you], talk with any of us on the Communications Committee--see message below--so we can help you with developing your connectivity and skills.)

The communications we need to send and receive as ARMA chapter members range from "hot" (notices of time-sensitive events or opportunities, like a chapter meeting) to "warm" (information on news or events that are current, but not immediate) to "cool" (generally, more lengthy matter that is informative, educational, entertaining, but not something that must be seen soon in order to have value to the reader). There is "cold" information, too--information not worth seeing, let alone reading: spam, most forwarded jokes and stories, rambles, etc.

Several of us realized that we have been beating ourselves up regularly because we were mixing "hot" and other messages in a single communication vehicle, the monthly Newsletter. If a deadline loomed because of the necessity of informing people about a dated event (the chapter meeting, a seminar, etc.), anyone who was slow in producing a less "hot" item (an article, artwork, etc.) had to be pressured to meet the deadline. If production were delayed for any reason, the tension and stress around the possibility of being too late to give members time to make the meeting ran high. Always, there remained proofreading, publishing, and posting tasks as a source of further stress as deadlines loomed. (You may remember that we used to send postcards in the U.S. Mail to remind people about membership meetings, as a hedge against problems in getting the Newsletter together timely.)

Why live with such stress when there are multiple tools and media for our communications?

We have realized that different media are appropriate for different kinds of messages:

E-Mail: Quick, easy-to-read e-mail messages are great for drawing attention to a time-sensitive matter. E-mail is not very good as a way to share lengthy articles, multi-part publications, Newsletters, and so forth.

Web Sites: A Web site offers many possibilities for communication. "Hot" news can appear on the "Home Page." Links direct a reader to more and more details, as one "drills down" to a level of detail that suits her. A Web site can be a "portal" to a wide variety of information: the ARMA International site offers a rich and diverse variety of resources, accessible from its opening page. We have used our Web site as the location where we have published our chapter newsletters. We know there is much potential in our chapter Web site that we haven't begun to tap! Contact Dawn Presler, our Web Master, if you have questions or ideas about our site.

Printed Matter: Traditional printed materials are best for such things as promotional brochures and flyers, professional journals, and even chapter newsletters. We have great examples of effective printed newsletters near by. Most noteworthy is the "2003 Newsletter of the Year" publication produced by the Puget Sound Chapter. (Puget Sound, by the way, again won the "Chapter of the Year (COTY)" award at the 2003 ARMA International Conference in Boston in October!) Our Communications Committee is already planning a Seattle Chapter printed publication to promote ARMA membership and highlight the accomplishments of our members and their organizations. We plan to produce occasional PDF and printed "journal" type newsletters to deliver more lengthy communications to our membership and other interested people. Such messages are important, but not "urgent" (in the sense of "time-driven"). It is often more convenient for a person to carry a printed article to a comfortable place and position for reading than to sit still in front of a computer screen and scroll from page to page.

Web Logs (Blogs): As you can see, we believe a Web Log ("blog") can be a most effective tool for communicating a variety of things to our members. "Blog" messages can be brief or lengthy. They typically involve information with links to other resources. They are similar to Web pages, except they change daily. They are similar to diaries or journals, since they are organized by date of posting, not by topic or other indices. Multiple people can post to them, eliminating the necessity of an editioral board or editor to manage publication. (Moderating, to ensure messages are relevant, on-topic, and so forth, is not the same as editing.) We will learn from our experience, as we get more and more participation from our members in adding to this Seattle Chapter Blog. (Please share the URL for our Blog with others, making sure to point out there is no "www" in the address: seattlearma.blogspot.com.

I hope you will use the Blog as a way to share information you have that may be of interest or use to other members of our chapter. It could be a sample of something you are writing, a link to an article you found interesting, a question or argument to stimulate a discussion, links to favorite computer utilities that help you professionally, ideas for future programs and other things.

As a reader, the key to finding a Blog useful is to return to it periodically, regularly. You may be able to set your software to notify you whenever a change has occurred in the Blog. You might return when we remind the membership to take a look, in a periodic, but brief e-mail message with a link to it. Let us know how you think we might make your experience with the Blog and with other forms of communication most valuable for you.

As a member, you can volunteer to be involved in our communicating. Sometimes people say "Communication is everything!" In a sense, that is quite true. The benefits of volunteering--learning and contributing--are available to you. You don't have to wait for us to ask! We hope you'll follow your impulse to contribute with communications, sharing what you know or want to learn with the rest of us.

Together, we will raise all of our boats!

THE GREATER SEATTLE CHAPTER OF ARMA STARTS A BLOG!

Today, the Greater Seattle Chapter of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators, begins this Web Log (Blog) as a way for its members to communicate with other members and with people interested in the subject matter areas about which records and information management professionals concern themselves.

Submissions for the Seattle ARMA Blog are welcomed from members of the Greater Seattle Chapter of ARMA at any time. They should be sent to the chapter president, Roger Winters, at Roger.Winters@metrokc.gov. A message will be posted to the Seattle Chapter's Blog as soon as we are able to review it and cut-and-paste it, using the functionality at www.blogger.com. Messages, to be posted, must be relevant to the mission of ARMA International and the activities and interests of the members of the Greater Seattle Chapter.

Messages must also add content; thus, no "I agree!" types of messages will be posted if that is all they contribute to the discussion, dialogue, and proceedings on this Blog. So long as messages are civil and on topic, we see no reason to censor, abridge, or manage them in any way.

While Blogs have been in existence for some time, few of us have much experience with them. We believe that a Blog for the Greater Seattle Chapter of ARMA will provide valuable information space for all of us to exchange ideas, questions, links to valuable resources, original writings, news, opinions, and other matters that might concern us as records and information management professionals. This Blog is an experiment that we hope will help invigorate our association by giving everyone a simple way to contribute and to learn about the chapter's business and activities.

If you are a reader of this Blog, we hope you will consider being a contributor. We trust you will choose to read only that which interests and engages you and skip the rest.

Writings attributed to a person belong to that person--they do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or opinions of ARMA International or of the Greater Seattle Chapter of ARMA.

Welcome to our chapter's Blog! We hope you will find it an exciting new way to communicate, contribute, and learn!

--The Greater Seattle Chapter of ARMA's Communications Committee: Susan Priebe, Roger Winters, Kristie Lundberg, Andrea Bettger, and Dawn Presler