Over the past few months, our office has been going through
a technological metamorphosis. Sadly, I
cannot report that we have purchased a new super computer, ground penetrating
radar machine, or the latest GPS. No,
this technological revolution has involved many of the more mundane aspects of
the digital age. This blog is one of the
more exciting of those technological innovations short of the great, geeky,
gadget euphoria that follows the purchase of new gear.
We have been implementing changes on a number of
technological fronts in order to make our company a leaner, meaner, more
organized, and more engaged entity. One
of our first tasks has been the organization and standardization of our digital
data into uniform and redundant storage.
Years worth of progress reports, digital photographs, PowerPoint
presentations, research resources, and, last but not least, final reports were
complied and sorted from their disparate locations on various hard drives and
data discs into one central repository, which was backed up to another hard
drive and burned to optical discs.
The centralization of this data, while enabling the very
practical purpose of being easy to back up, also allows us easy access to our past
digital efforts, especially digital photographs and collected research
materials. This allows us an opportunity
to share projects that we have been involved in with readers of this blog and
those who follow us on Facebook,
increasing public engagement with their cultural resources. The centralization of our data also allows us
quick access to digital research materials, eliminating the need to re-locate
resources, increasing our efficiency.
The organization of our data also provides a blueprint for
storing data moving forward. Every user
and employee has a unique method of organizing their work at their station
while completing projects. Some are “lumpers”,
that is users that organize data into large folders under simple file hierarchies,
while others are “splitters”, that is users that form complex file hierarchies
to organize their data. One of the goals
of our data centralization project was to find a happy medium between lumpers
and splitters that presents a uniform workspace for data storage for all
users. This means that each employee
only has to learn one form of file hierarchy in order to access data.
Some concerns had to be addressed in order to make a central
data system feasible. Chief among these
concerns was security. No personal or sensitive
company information is shared in the central system. The purpose of the system is to increase
access to shared company resources, not to divulge company information to every
employee or leave us vulnerable to an outside threat. Secondly, a universal naming system for files
and folders had to be established in order to keep the system organized and
easy to back up. This included careful
attention to details such as not nesting too many folders, a problem that leads
to long file location names and difficulties in copying the resources to other
company computers or storage media. Lastly,
a maintenance schedule needed to be established in order to trim the fat from
the file system and keep it backed up.
If your hard drive hasn’t failed yet, you are lucky, but it is always
important to remember the possibility is a constant threat. Optical discs, such as cds, dvds, and
blu-rays, also have a limitedshelf life for data, and are susceptible to environmental strain or
misuse.
We have just completed our first project using the central
data system and it has been a resounding success. Now all employees know where to access data
and how to keep up with project inertia.
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