Going Forward: Document “best practices” and protocols
In earlier posts I have shared memoranda distributed at a recent organization-wide meeting, including an explanation of our taxonomic structures and details of various file-naming conventions adopted for this project. Attached to this post are two additional memos:
- Download: Best practices and protocols for GSA Documents
- Download: Organization of advocate-user directories
As I so often like to say, allow me to explain:
In making practical decisions about handling files targeted by our Google Search Appliance (GSA), we look both backward and forward in time. This dichotomy between the past and the future is one that Google Enterprise itself promotes with its cursory recommendations that its customers decide for themselves where to locate existing content and new content.
Based on our experience working on this project, there are considerable differences in how to handle the “past.” A separate post on those issues will be coming forth, soon. But going forward into the “future,” we have thrashed out the practices and protocols detailed in the two memos linked, above. While there are institutional contexts for some things described in the memos that may be lost on those not part of our organization, the memos are (hopefully) self-explanatory. There are other practical details about the document protocols that will be expanded on in later posts, including how the Shared Repository web interface works, the integration of our metadata models, and so on. (All good things come to those who wait, at least with this project.)
Among the most practical observations in these memos, I think, is breaking through the common but incorrect perception that one needs to save a document to “the” correct directory, as opposed to “a” correct directory, however it is done. And while staff are instintively bewildered, somewhat, by concepts of “taxonomy” and “metadata” and wonder how they will be able to find things if they are not located in “the” correct directory, it is also extraordinarily reassuring to them to know that we’re talking about Google here. Even if they do not understand how it all works, typically they have great faith that Google search will find it for them, as described in an earlier ancecdote.
The memos also attempt to address some of the practical realities and limits of a non-profit, legal services work environment. LSNC has neither the resources nor motivation to micro-manage how users organize their own file directories. Life is too short. But as detailed in the “advocate-user directories” memo, we do now require all LSNC staff to have a user-specific, user-named directory, and that the name used be the user’s full name. The primary motivation for this requirement is a practical need to standardize directory-name conventions throughout the organization, so that the location and targeting of files is predictable, manageable and findable. And, if for no other reason, doing so eliminates the need to guess whether something is located in the Shareen, Shari, Shelly or Sherri directory — a real-world example from our Auburn office, illustrated to the right.