Taking retention as an example, people will keep what they feel like keeping if they are in any way tech savvy and unless you take draconian measures to stop them. Archiving happens with a click of a button in most clients, work emails can be forwarded to personal accounts at any time, and employees seldom take retention seriously. If your policies are strict enough and you have a high enough buy in within your organization, you may be able to minimize unnecessary retention and the liability associated with it, but to be safe you should assume that every email you and your coworkers write will last forever.

Thank you for your very thorough and thoughtful comment. Certainly the efforts at all levels of digitization are distinguished by the audience for whom the material is aimed and the underlying purpose of the effort. The human and fiscal resources available for every project also add another layer into this very complex undertaking. And that just scratches the surface of a beginning overview of digitization efforts.

As I continue to scratch I’ll indulge and share more thoughts and I look forward to seeing other comments and insights in this space.

Speaking as someone who has worked on the ground floor of a book digitization company, I can say that the quality that a company like Google produces while attempting to digitize as much as possible, as quickly as possible simply can’t be very good. Is it good enough? Probably, in most cases, for most members of the public, it is. Is it going to be a little sketchy to use for the purposes of any intensive academic studies of the contents of historic publications? You better believe it will be!

This is a discussion that has been going on in the library literature since the beginning of the idea of digitizing historic collections so I won’t go much deeper into that discussion in this brief comment. The point I want to make, though, is that all digitization efforts are not equivalent so you need to be careful throwing around the idea of duplication of effort. Google Books is doing something quite different from what the Kentuckiana Digital Library is doing. Even if Google decided to start scanning the Daily Racing Form the results would look and feel quite distinct.

The underlying purpose has a large role in determining the product that is produced by a digitization effort. Scanning books is scanning books is scanning books to the casual observer, but the results can be quite different. I’m struggling to think of good illustrative examples, which is one of the reasons why the difference is not always obvious, but having seen 20th century novels scanned where every use of modern becomes modem in the searchable text I can tell you there is a difference. Similar examples that I have heard from those who digitize newspapers is decisions about how to distinguish between advertisements and articles in the searchable text. For an operation like Google Books those are problems and questions that simply never come up. For scholars and researchers this kind of stuff can matter a lot, while for most people it is not a problem.

What amazes me is just how far this has come between the time we started preparing the material for the Kentucky Bar Association program in the early summer months, and the time we gave the final presentation last week. There was not much law on the impact of social media and social networking, at the time we started. In fact, there were not even that many articles about it.

Now, there is an avalanche of articles, studies, white papers, seminars, podcasts, etc., and there is a rapidly growing number of LinkedIn and Facebook groups devoted to subsets of this, in addition to the usual SEO folks and instant experts who pop up with any apparent gold rush.

The law is typically very slow to catch up with such social changes and it will be an even greater challenge now, since the legislative and judicial systems have not substantially changed over the last few decades, while the rest of society rapidly slips from the Web 2.0 world into Web 3.0 and beyond. What was science fiction just a year or so ago is now actually in beta or on eBay.

More and more people see the value of being present on several networks, not only because it would be boring to ‘attend the same conference’ over and over again, but also because different networks serve different purposes, fosters different relationships, brings out different interactions and community qualities. Why limit yourself to just one? As you point out – different needs call for different actions and ‘places’.

Connected is legally focused, and that’s not the only thing differentiating it from other networks – it is not just a network. It is a network that is layered on top of, and growing beside, huge repositories of legal content on martindale.com. For example, if someone writes a legal article that shows on martindale.com (which is a hefty amount per month) it is piped into their Connected profile so you can connect with those who write on your topic of choice. The way the two sit together now may not be optimal but we’re working hard on making this integration stronger. Connected is not a ‘separate’ site – it is an extension of martindale.com

I do hope you enjoy Connected and am recommending a tour around Groups, where you can find hundreds of different groups to join, depending on interest and goals. Enjoy and do let me know if you have any questions, comments and/or suggestions.