AC22 | Session 13

"Moving Skeletons into the Cloud: A Network Drive Cleanup Case Study"

 

OVERVIEW: For hundreds of years, Parisians overfilled their cemeteries with bodies, until those cemeteries reached the bursting point (literally) in 1780. The French catacombs serve as a fascinating example of one city’s attempt to control the ever-increasing volume of human remains by creating a natural underground bone repository and employing methods of organization.

Our shared network drives at the Utah State Archives were like the 1,000-year-old Parisian cemeteries of 1780: oversaturated. And we just kept burying more and more bodies there. Records had piled up like bones and were cluttering our network drives to the point where they could not be identified, retrieved, or properly disposed of. We were bursting at the seams and had to continually pay additional amounts of money to accommodate the ROT-ting corpses.

In April 2019, our director tasked me with moving agency records off of the shared network drive and into a cloud solution. In this session I will present the story of how we accomplished the task: from managing the project, to creating a file plan (aka folder structure), to helping co-workers adapt to the change. There were plenty of pitfalls and apparent dead ends, but in the end, we successfully left the dirt behind and ventured forth into an organized Cloud solution.
GARA CERTIFICATE COMPETENCIES: "Retention and Disposition" OR "Electronic Records and Information Management"

PRESENTER: Kendra Whitaker Yates, Chief Records Officer, RIM Section Administrator, Utah Division of Archives & Records Service