Preventing loss of organizational memory

MENCEGAH KEHILANGAN MEMORI ORGANISASI

PREVENTING THE ORGANIZATIONAL

MEMORY LOSS

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Rusnah Johare

Alwi Mohd Yunus

1Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY


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NATIONAL MEMORY


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MEMORY OF THE WORLD

4

Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

MEMORY OF THE WORLD

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THE LOST MEMORY :

LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES DESTROYED IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY FIRST CENTURY


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LIBRARIES AND COLLECTIONS (INCLUDING ARCHIVAL MATERIALS) DAMAGED OR DESTROYED

YEAR / LIBRARY

CAUSES OF DAMAGE OR DESTRUCTION

1904 Italy, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino

• Fire started in the Library. Irreparable damage was done to some of the most renowned treasures.

1914 Belgium,Library of the Catholic University of Louvain

• Over 300,000 volumes, about 1,000 incunabula, hundreds of manuscripts were all reduced to ashes when German soldiers set fire to the library on August 25 following German invasion of Belgium at the beginning of the First World War.



YEAR / LIBRARY


1923 Japan • The Imperial University Library in Tokyo was destroyed and most of its contents, amounting to about 700,000 volumes, was lost. The Cabinet Library lost 70,000 volumes.

1937-1945 China

National University of Tsing Hua, Peking

• Losses during the Sine-Japanese War A great many private and public libraries were destroyed. The most important losses were:

200,000 out of 350,000 volumes including the card catalogue.



YEAR / LIBRARY


1937-1945 ChinaUniversity Nan-k’ai, T’ien-chin.

Institute of Technology of He-pei, T’ien-chin.

Medical College of Hei-pei, Pao-ting.

Agriculture College of Hei-pei, Pao-ting.

National University of Hu-nan.

University of Nanking.

• More than 224,000 volumes were lost as a result of bombing in July 1937.

• Completely destroyed by bombs.




• 10% of collections disappeared after 1939. Probably transferred to Japan, together with the card catalogue.



YEAR / LIBRARY


1937-1945 China

Royal Asian Society, Shang-hai

University of Shang-hai

Soochow University

• Collections transferred to Tokyo after 1939.

• 27% of collections in Western languages disappeared after 1939, as well as 40% of collections of works in Chinese. Probably transferred to Japan. Many other books damaged by water.

• More than 30% of the most important books disappeared during Japanese occupation 1937-1939



YEAR / LIBRARY


1937 United States

• Hundreds of libraries in Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois and Mississippi were destroyed by floods.

1938 -1945 Czechlovakia

1939-1945Germany

• Total losses of books, manuscripts and incunabula were estimated at 2,000,000 volumes following the German occupation and after the Munich Conference of 1938 when Czechoslovakia was robbed of a great section of territory. Thousands of volumes were confiscated, burned, totally destroyed or sent to Germany.

• The Second World War proved disastrous for German libraries. Millions of books have been lost, although many of the most precious works have been preserved by storage elsewhere; it has been estimated that a third of all German books were destroyed.



YEAR / LIBRARY


1976 Cambodia • Following their rise to power, the Khmer Rouge systematically began to destroy all vestiges of ‘corrupt’ culture. In the National Library of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge threw out and burned most of the books and all bibliographical records; less than 20% of the collection survived. The total amount of damage is unknown, but irreparable harm has been done to the country’s national heritage. The remaining material is seriously threatened by bad storage conditions, especially in the case of palm leaf manuscripts.

1978 United States

Stanford University Library

1984 The Netherlands

Library of the Dutch-South Africa Society

• Water main break caused major damage to 40,000 books plus 3,000 valuable items including miniature books.

• In January, left-wing activists destroyed the uniquely important library by throwing the books in the canals.



YEAR / LIBRARY


1986 United States

• In April, a deliberately-set fire destroyed the nation’s third largest public library. In the worst library fire in American history, nearly 400,000 volumes were completely destroyed and another 700,000 volumes were water-soaked.

1990 Kuwait

1993 BosniaNational Library

in Sarajevo

1994 Great Britain

Norwich Central Library

• Following the invasion by Iraqi troops, libraries and computer centers were destroyed (as in the case of the National Scientific and Technological Information Center removed to Baghdad).

• 90% of the collection was destroyed as a result of the civil war, with the loss of unique material for the study of Bosnian culture.

• On 1st August, a fire destroyed over 350,000 books as well as irreplaceable historical documents concerning the Norwich area.

(Memory of the World, UNESCO,1996).



YEAR / LIBRARY


2003 Iraq

National Library

National Archives

National Museum

• Almost nothing remains of the library’s, archive’s and museum’s collections of millions of manuscripts, unpublished archival materials, books, and Iraqi newspapers.

(The Guardian, Tuesday April 15, 2003)


DATA AND RECORDS LOSS STATISTIC

SECTORS 2000 - 2012

Business • 521,586,473 sensitive records were lost with a mean of 462,809 records per incident

Education

Government

Medical

• 11, 286, 999 sensitive records with a mean of 22,756 records per incident

• 182,500,510 sensitive records with a mean of 410,113 records per incident

• 11, 182,713 sensitive records with a mean of 41,112 records per incident.

Source: http:datalossdb.org/index/most_discussed [Retreived 19 Jan 2013]


WHAT IS HAPPENING OUT THERE?

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State Sued For Deleting E-Mails (Sacramento Bee, February 2003).

The Securities and Exchange Commission fines five broker-dealers a total of $8.25 million for failure to preserve e-mail communications.

Andersen found guilty of obstruction of justice by shredding several thousand documents and deleted thousands of e-mails relating to the failed energy giant Enron. The firm is given the maximum penalty under the law, is no longer in the auditing business, and has lost tens of thousands of employees.


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PART OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY OF ARTHUR ANDERSEN

THE SCENE: Arthur Andersen's Houston branchSource: http://www.time.com/business/article/0,8599,263006,00.html[Retrieved 11 Jan. 2010]


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PART OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY

Damaged Documents / Records


- US Census Bureau e-records

- Satellite observations of Brazil

- e-records of the former East

German government

- The first e-mail message

- 1986 Doomsday project in the UK

- The Canadian NDOC logs

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Source: KATIE HAFNERPublished: November 10,2004

Even Digital Memories Can Fade


ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY HAVE BEEN DESTROYED AND DAMAGED AND WILL CONTINUE TO SUFFER THIS FATE AS A RESULT OF:

Carelessness Accidental fires Arson Natural disasters Shelling and air attacks Enemy-action Partisans and liberators Revolutionaries and counter-

revolutionaries Inherent instability of the materials


ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY HAVE BEEN DESTROYED AND DAMAGED AND WILL CONTINUE TO SUFFER THIS FATE AS A RESULT OF:

Poor storage facilities Lack of training Lack of staff discipline Lack of interest from peers Lack of interest from administrators Lack of interest from top management

and policy makers Biological agents : mould, insects and

rodents.


COMPONENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY

EXPLICIT TACIT

• Document• Records• Recordkeeping systems• Information systems• Published information• Organizations’

operations• Work processes• Support systems• Products • Services• Written policies• Written histories• Databases• People / staff• Recorded tacit

knowledge

• Knowledge from “the tricks of the trade” / expertise

• Collective work habits• Shared assumptions• Way work is understood• Ideas• Decision making• Experiences from the past • Buried values • Spirit • Aspiration• Core belief• Mindsets• Habit of thinking• How to • Embedded knowledge / skills• Lessons over time• Semantic understanding


COMPONENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY

EXPLICIT TACIT

• Tacit feel• Unconscious interpretations• Axiomatic statements• Past success• Present success• Past mistakes • Present mistakes• Wisdom


PREVENTING THE ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY LOSS : PRESERVING THE MEMORY

RECORDS & ARCHIVAL TECHNIQUES

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (KM) TECHNIQUES

• Recordkeeping systems • Preservation of recorded & digital information: - preventive - restorative - content preservation

• CoP

• Oral History

• Knowledge capture


RECORDS & ARCHIVAL TECHNIQUES : PREVENTIVE PRESERVATION

Storage facilities Environmental control Disaster control planning


RECORDS AND ARCHIVAL TECHNIQUES : RESTORATIVE

Preservation and Restoration of paper document – tissue repair



Tissue Repair Encapsulation



Binding


RECORDS & ARCHIVAL TECHNIQUES: RESTORATIVE

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Restoration of film archives



Restoration of photographic archives



Equipment for restoration of film archives and digital archives



Equipment used for the restoration of paper-based records

National Archives of Korea 31Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

ORAL HISTORY PRESERVES LEGACIES & CORPORATE MEMORY


ORAL HISTORY PRESERVES LEGACIES & CORPORATE MEMORY

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Oral History is the systematic collection of living people’s testimony about their own experiences.

Oral History is not folklore, gossip, hearsay, or rumor.

Oral historians attempt to verify their findings, analyze them, and place them in an accurate historical context.

Oral historians are also concerned with storage of their findings for use by later scholars.


RECORDED INTERVIEWS

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• Interviews need planning well in advance.

• Time is needed to ensure that the right questions are formulated and asked.

• Formulating questions is best achieved by interviewer who knows the subject knowledge very well (an effective interviewer is crucial).

• Questions must be analytical and descriptive.

• Produce a transcript from an audio recording and have it validated.

• Preserve the audio and video recording in a trusted digital repository for organizational or national memory.


KEY STAGES OF OH INTERVIEWS

Planning

Identify Your Informant

Identify Interviewer

Interviewer to conduct

research on Informant

Interview sessions

Transcribing, Organize,

package and share

Preservation of recorded

interviews

Key Stages of OH

interviews


ORAL HISTORY In OH projects, an interviewee

recalls an event for an interviewer who records the recollections and creates a historical record.


ORAL HISTORY

Event

Interviewee

Interviewer Verify, analyse, accurate

historical context

historical record


ORAL HISTORY

OH depends upon human memory and the spoken

word.

The means of collection can vary from taking notes by hand to elaborate electronic aural and video recordings.


ORAL HISTORY

The human life span puts boundaries on the subject matter that we collect with OH.

We can only have one lifetime, our limits move forward in time with each generation.


ORAL HISTORY

Can we afford to wait?


ORAL HISTORY

This leads to the Oral Historian’s Anxiety Syndrome (Shopes, 2008), that panicky realization that irretrievable information is slipping away from us with every moment.


CORPORATE MEMORY

Newspaper cutting of Merdeka


CORPORATE ASSET


LEGACY / CORPORATE ASSETS


CORPORATE ASSET


LEGACIES


LEGACIES / MEMORY OF THE NATION


MEMORY OF THE NATION






CORPORATE ASSET


CORPORATE ASSET


CORPORATE ASSET


CORPORATE ASSET


CORPORATE ASSET


CORPORATE ASSET


LEGACIES


LEGACY/ MEMORY OF THE NATION


LEGACY / MEMORY OF THE NATION


LEGACY / MEMORY OF THE NATION


The importance of OH in the context of records and archival and corporate memory perspectives.


ISSUES Folklore and experiences of

olden times face the grave of rapid extinction.

Disruption in the transmission of our heritage to the younger generation.

Writing long letters, memoirs, essays and keeping diaries are things of the past. 62Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

ISSUES Attempts to re-write the

history of Malaysia, administrative history, corporate memory and legacies lies in the dearth of original or primary sources.

OH can help capture and preserve the unrecorded and generally unfamiliar memories of the past and present as evidences of history. 63Rusnah Johare & Alwi Mohd Yunus

RELEVANCE AND VALUE OF OH

OH can help capture and preserve the unrecorded and generally unfamiliar memories and tacit knowledge of the past and present as evidences of history.


RELEVANCE AND VALUE OF OH

OH can play an important role in complementing and supplementing the documented evidences to enhance the sources on our 21st century legacies, corporate memory and the memory of the nation.


Thank You
