The PDA Replaces the PDO PDQ

I live in Gmail, the email system I use for my personal email, and I use it to send messages, to chat with fellow users of Gmail, and to store, organize, and search for my email. Those 5GB of storage space (and counting) are so inviting that I even store backups of important files in email, meaning I can access them instantly, no matter where I am, anywhere on the globe, so long as I have an Internet connection. In effect, my Gmail account--along with my various blogs, my YouTube site, and my various stores of electronic documents, photographs, and videos--form my own dispersed and disarrayed MyLifeBits project. It holds my memory for me, because I can't depend on human memory. (Of course, I still have an active paper life as well, especially at home, where I keep journals, write poems, and sketch, usually by hand on sheets of dry wood pulp.)

Although Gmail is free, Google (its creator) is a company and needs to make money somehow, so what they do is display ads in a couple of places in the GUI of the email system. Because I'm an archivist and records manager, I tend to be interested in the concept of records, so I tend to use the word "record" (and its plural) quite a bit. Apparently, this caused Gmail to show me this "sponsored link":

Personal Doc Organizer
Makes organizing your important personal documents easy - Grab & Go
www.MyHelperPDO.com

Being a man of some curiosity, I decided to take a look at the Personal Doc Organizer (all the while wondering why the familiar "Doc," most frequently associated with members of the medical profession, made sense as the middle name of this product for this advertisement). After all, I'm a records professional as well as a person who has to manage his own records. My office at work is usually exceptionally neat, and that neatness helps keep me from forgetting to complete certain tasks. (I did spend part of the day today foldering or discarding a small pile of papers that had accumulated over the past few months, but even without this improvement my desk was probably the neatest in the Archives. And I do this without any filing cabinets at all, just a couple of file drawers. Most of what I keep long term is electronic.)


My home office is another matter: a landscape piles of papers, books, and boxes--all waiting for me to assign them some order. I give up at home, deciding that perfect order will have to wait. So the question was, Could the PDO help me manage my own records? The answer was easy: No. First, I doubt the "100 archival safe sheet protectors" or the binder itself would allow enough space to save the wide range of documents this system is designed to manage: financial, personal, medical, etc. A filing system, even for a single modern human being, cannot be contained in such a small space. Second, the filing structure seems only half-thought-out. What exactly are the distinctions between the categories "Financial," "Loans," and "Monthly Bills"? Is "Personal Papers" a reasonably narrow topic under which to store records? And what exactly--and this is an old question--should go under "Miscellaneous"? People aren't good with categorical rigor--I'll grant you that--but categorical confusion is of less help. I should point, out, however, that the dividers that carry the subject categories do include explanations that may clarify this distinctions. The third reason this system is not for me is that it tries to present itself esthetically by covering each divider with pretty pictures that do nothing but confuse the mind. And, hey, I don't believe the vinyl business card holders are "archival safe," and my doctor has never given me a business card to put in there anyway.

Certainly, the idea of a single binder that you can grab as you're escaping an oncoming brush fire has its charms, and the minimalist records creator who hews closely to a set of retention guidelines might be able to put this product to good use, but why not just buy a regular binder and dividers on your own and save two thirds the online price of the "system"? What I do is keep the few very important papers I have in a little fire safe with a handle. In the event of an emergency, I can grab that and leave. But if I don't make it to the fire safe in time, the records should withstand the fire.

What of my other records? Many are temporary records that I really need to hold onto for only about a month, so there's no real loss there. Any risk management plan would allow me to lose those records easily. Others would be helpful to own, but I can replace most of them by going to the companies and institutions I'm associated with. The process would take a little bit of time, but it's possible. My great loss would be my family archives, maybe 20 cubic feet of records going back almost 150 years: thousands of photographs, numerous films and videotapes, a few audiotapes, about forty years of my grandmother's diaries, and the records of almost all grandparental branches of my wife's and my families. That would be the loss.

Anyway, I don't need the PDO at all. My valuable information is digital and kept accessible to me at all times. I might need to grow that repository a bit, but I see it as a real source of protection for records I really need.

archivity furthers