I suspect that many on this list are unaware of how RAIN came about and how it is produced. Over 15 years ago I decided to start sharing news stories whose main theme was records management, archives or some aspect of either one. The idea was that records management and archives are behind many stories that appear in the press. In the beginning I would manually transcribe stories that I found in newspapers and then post them to 2 US-based lists. Originally I used “Record/Archives In the News” as part of the subject line, but you can imagine how many keystrokes that took so I shortened to RAIN.

I found the stories by manually searching key newspaper websites. No search engines existed back then that could provide me with the results I was seeking. Eventually Google came about and I was able to set up various news alerts. Currently I have over 60 alerts searching out for stories.

I used to review each news alert, select stories and then past them into a single message. But that took time more time than I could afford to devote to the process considering the amount of travel and work I was taking on. I also realized that not every story in the digest that created was of interest to everyone on the 4 lists that posted to. So last year I changed my methodology. As a result I created a Yahoo group called RAINbytes and a twitter feed by the same name. I found that I could use the bit.ly sidebar tool to shorten the links for each story and then use it to post the story to my Yahoo group as well as tweeting it.

My intention  was never to totally stop posting to all the lists. I knew that occasionally I would come across stories that would be of interest to the lists themselves. What I have learned is that people access information via different ways. Down below are some statistics that show that who gets RAIN in what manner, what I don’t know is how many are subscribed to the 4 main listservs. Well I do know that the US RM list has about 2700+ subscribers

RAINbyte Yahoo group subscribers – 315

RAINbyte Twitter followers – 630

Twitter lists RAINbyte is on 61

RAINbyte paper.li subscribers 114

Totally postings to date 9,455

Now what many may not realize is that what gets posted on the RM UK list is maybe 5-10% of what gets posted to my Yahoo group and twitter. Bit.ly provides me automatically with statistics as to what country and how many individuals from that country have accessed a story. In most cases 25% of clicks come from the UK.

My intent has always been to share information with my professional colleagues, information that they can use in their everyday work. I can’t tell you how many times someone has emailed me privately to say  “thanks that story was just what I needed today” Probably the same number as those who consider RAIN to be a “public nuisance” ;-)

I’ve always suggested that if individual don’t like RAIN that there are methods by which one doesn’t have to see them . Remember we are information management professionals. How can we tell our customers how they should manage their email if we can’t even do that?

Any way thanks for your indulgence. Whatever the results of the survey I’ll abide by the list’s decision

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