I posted here a year ago laying out a detailed methodology for collection and preservation of the contents of a Gmail account in the static form of a standard Outlook PST.  Try as I might to make it foolproof, downloading Gmail using IMAP and Outlook is tricky.  Happily since my post, the geniuses at Google introduced a truly simple, no-cost way to collect Gmail and other Google content for preservation and portability.  It sets a top flight example for online service providers, and presages how we may use the speed, power and flexibility of Google search as a culling mechanism before exporting for e-discovery. Continue reading →

In his keynote speech at the Zapproved Preservation Excellence Conference in Portland, Dr. Tony Salvador of Intel compared the “encores” of performers today to those of performers a century ago. “Encore,” Salvador noted, is French for “again;” yet, we use it to mean “more.”  Today, performers brought back by applause don’t repeat their performance; they play a different song.

But for hundreds of years, the encore was an unpredictable, spontaneous eruption.  Stirred by a brilliant aria in the midst of a performance, members of the audience would leap to their feet in applause, shouting, “ENCORE! ENCORE!” The singer and musicians were compelled to stop and perform the same song AGAIN.  This might happen over and over, until the rapture was so fixed in the listeners’ minds they’d relent and let the performance continue.

The audiences of the 18^th and 19^th centuries demanded repetition of what they heard because there was no technology to reproduce it.  Once Edison made sound stick to a cylinder, the mid-show encore disappeared, and the race to record everything began.

The natural world is an analog world.  The signals to our senses vary continuously over time, experienced as waves of light, vibration or other stimuli.  Much of the last century was devoted to recording analogs of these analogs; that is, preserving the waves of the natural world as waves that could be impressed upon tinfoil, wax and vinyl, as areas of transparency and opacity on photographic film or as regions of varying magnetic intensity on tape.

Then, late in the 20th century, we learned to mimic analog information using the rapid “on” and “off” of digital data, and devoted the last quarter of the century to converting our vast collection of analog recordings to digital forms.  ENCORE! ENCORE! (But this time, do it in ones and zeroes, okay?). It was my generation’s take on converting manuscripts to movable type in the middle ages. Continue reading →

I am not a dinosaur.  Except that I prefer e-mail to texting, and I forget that my students have never used a record player or lived without the Internet.  I’m not near the national average of 14 daily visits to Facebook, and I’ve yet to text a photo of my genitals–a practice so routine that it has a name, “junk shots” and its very own app, “Snapchat.”  When I need to know how to turn off a nagging dashboard light, I prefer written instructions over YouTube, and I do not video every concert and papal investiture I attend.  I still have two landline phone numbers.

Omigosh!  That last one.  I AM a dinosaur!

According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, more than 41% of American households have no landline phone, relying on wireless service alone.  For those between the ages of 25 and 29, two-thirds are wireless-only.  Per an IDC report sponsored by Facebook, four out of five people start using their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up and, for most, it’s the very first thing they do, ahead of brushing their teeth or answering nature’s call.

I cite these astonishing statistics to underscore a tendency in e-discovery to seek information in those places where we’ve grown comfortable despite compelling evidence that relevant information is elsewhere.  I’ve written on this “Streetlight Effect” before (at p. 252 of this collection of articles), in the context of the blind eye long turned to shortcomings of keyword search.  The latest manifestation is graver still, and will make for a perilous future if we do not rise to the challenge now.

I speak of the rapid accretion of unique, relevant data on mobile devices that has greatly outstripped our ability (or willingness) to preserve and process same.  Look around you.  Do you see the look down generation out there?  Why do you suppose the person in front of you on the jetway is walking so #$%^& slowly?

Apple just sold ten million units of its latest iPhone.  Ten million.  In a week.  How many of those purchasers sought a better device for making phone calls?  Did Apple even hint it had improved the phone as a phone?  No siree, Bob! Continue reading →