April 2008 Archives

Accessing the history of any department within a branch of government can seem trying at times. For example, the technology used by the Office of the President required end users to decide which emails were necessary for long term preservation, as opposed to storing all of the data, regardless of personal interpretation. Therefore, accessing the unabridged version of the email records for the Republics highest office was hampered by user precision and recall, not technology. Where precision represents the number of correct hits in a return set of specified length; recall represents the number of correct returns relative to the total number of possible correct returns. Specifically, deciding which emails should and shouldn't be kept for long term retention is best left up to software and open records managers. (read more)

Individual memory and recognition generally suffers from two academic principals outlined in the seminar "Search and Information Retrieval", as well as an interview we did with Recomminds David Baskin. The first principal is "precision"; it defines ones ability to correctly identify content. The second is "recall"; it defines the capability to regularly identify new content within the same grouping as the first piece of content. Individuals often have difficulty identifying a proper category for content, and then subsequently pooling new content into the same category. Expecting users to remember emails from partners, customers and coworkers within a specific group for early case assessment will be a lesson in "missed expectations" and can be costly in terms of legal risk. (read more)

Getting to the center of a matter by way of custodian and concept searching will improve your legal risk management on a case-by-case basis. However, many mid-sized organizations continue to face challenges in terms of cost and complexity when they want to evaluate email. Estorian LookingGlass Spherical Indexing can manage and evaluate email at low cost, with reduced complexity delivering, making it a valuable solution for the mid-market. Mid-sized companies have much more email than they realize, often exceeding 1-2 terabytes in size. For example, 3000 users manage thirty-five 50 kilobyte messages a day over the course of 365 days will yield 1.35 terabytes of email. (read more)