The Digital Challenge
Are you properly archiving and keeping track of the digital data and information created in your school?
- Are you in danger of being held responsible for the failure to continue to maintain your School’s Heritage?
- Are you aware that your School no longer protects and preserves a key aspect of its recent history?
- And that, if you (the current Head, Bursar or Governor) do not take urgent action, this “at risk data” will be lost forever – during your watch!
Why should it matter to you and your School?
Perhaps as early as tomorrow, someone will want to contrast and compare the details of Headmaster's “welcome messages” for the first year of each of the last five decades – they should find 1980, 1990, 2000, captured in the Archive, but will they find 2010 and 2020?
When your current or future Development Directors want to identify Alumni who have interests in a particular subject (a sport, an academic area, whatever) then how will they be able to make that detailed Search such that they can pinpoint those most likely to agree to provide funding?
In 20 years' time, how will the complete account of pre- and post- Covid 19 be able to be put together – trying to compare (say) 1999 with 2019 and 2029?
Obviously as the years go by, more and more “where is the missing data” questions will be asked – when there could and should be no missing data.
This does really matter. Your current staff will be utilising the Archives relating to their particular areas and trawling them for useful “Living Information” for their teaching plans.
Your prospective parents will want to be able to access – and search or browse – your Heritage as contained in your on-line Archives. But what if they cannot find the details important to them/their children because it simply has not been captured?
Every School is aware of the value of its Heritage, including the details of its Alumni, both for “soft” reasons and for far more hard-nosed financial and other resource requirements. Why make the job much harder, when proper “data capture” and its subsequent transfer to “Living Information” provides a totally searchable database of opportunities?