Peter
Keep up the good work! I for one would rather have too much information than too little!
Regards
Iain
Iain Harrison
Information Governance Consultant
Leicester City Council
0116 252 7606
>>> Peter Kurilecz <[log in to unmask]> 11/01/2008 14:33 >>>
On Jan 11, 2008 8:34 AM, Jen Parker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Maybe Peter could relax a bit on the RAIN announcements too? I've counted
> 5 since Sunday (6th Jan) which makes it one a day so far. Informative as
> they are, i think this is also a bit excessive. Maybe you could
> consider cramming more posts into less emails. Or distinguishing them by
> region. e.g one email for UK articles, one email for US articles etc..
>
>
Jen
thanks for the comments about RAIN. first let me explain how i gather and
compile the RAIN postings (Records and Archives In the News). I have 50+
Google News alerts running every day. each News Alert is running against a
specific phrase or keyword(s). Each alert arrives with n+1 stories in them.
Each day I review the alerts and select those that contain stories that I
think may be of interest to folks on 4 different email lists (2 US, 2 UK).
Every other day I sit down at my computer and go through the saved alerts
selecting the stories and compiling the RAIN posting. Sometimes the story I
thought might be of interest is not and I don't select it for the
compilation. At the same time that I'm compiling RAIN I am capturing via pdf
some of the stories for my resource/reference files.
Now this compilation is done at night. I have a day job. This day job on
occasion requires me to travel to various locations to work with clients ( I
work for a very well known HUGE software company in the area of
compliance/records management). so sometimes my compilation of RAIN gets
backed up do to work demands. I may be working on client materials at night
as well as during the day. this happens to be the case with this past
weekends postings.
as to cramming more stories into emails well one of the lists that I post to
restricts the length of listserv messages to 500 lines. last week that
happened with one of the posts and I had to reedit that post to meet that
restriction.
as to creating a UK specific posting well I tried that years ago, in my
opinion RIM knows no boundaries. For example a couple of years ago the UK
instituted FOIA something that has been going on in the US for over 30
years. I believe that some of the FOI stories from the US contain
information that is relevant to the UK sector. In addition there are not
that many UK stories that pop up in the google alerts (and they are
searching UK newspapers) I have in the past tried to segregated the stories
by topic but that was just too burdensome and time consuming.
As it stands now each RAIN posting consists of two days' worth of news
stories. I am well aware that many of the postings may not contain many UK
related stories. but remember that RAIN goes out to folks all over the
world.
As to excessive you don't want to know the number of 'out of office'
messages I receive from UK addresses when I post RAIN. I wonder if some of
the folks email accounts have been permanently set to 'out of office'
Finally I've been 'publishing' RAIN for over 10 years now. I receive no
remuneration (as I haven't been able to find a way to put a tip jar in my
sig block ;-) ) except for the odd beer now and then at conferences or
private emails thanking me.
have a good weekend
Peter Kurilecz CRM CA
Richmond, Va
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