Passive versus active Collecting techniques & Storage

There are different ways of handling personal records. In the 20th century, archivists would wait until records had already been created to begin collecting, organizing, and maintaining them. This is referred to as passive collecting. Chances are that some of the records in your collection were passively collected. You created the records. Once you left the service, you decided to organize them somehow. You moved them from their original location to another one.

Consider, for instance, a sergeant (E-6) of a squad. As chief officer of the unit, the sergeant must write Enlisted Performance Reports (EPRs) about the soldiers under his command. Imagine yourself in a similar position: you are a retired sergeant, and you want to collect the reports you wrote on your subordinates. You could compile all the reports you wrote throughout your career, gather them in a single folder, and organize them by date and the person’s name described in the EPR. Then, you figure out a strategy to create copies and keep them. This is passive collecting. However, there is another way.

Let’s say you are a sergeant but are still on duty. You are nearing the time when you need to write EPRs for your squad members. You know that there are eight members in your squad, so you’ll write eight EPRs. In this case, you are working on the long-term preservation of your records as you are creating them. Because of this, even before you write the first report, you already know how many copies you want of your entire collection and where they will be: whether these copies are local (e.g., external hard drives) or remote (e.g., Dropbox or another cloud service). Then, you also have an idea of how to organize the information in your collection ahead of time. For instance, your EPRs will be located in a different section than your enlistment contract.

Then, once you’re done writing the first report, you save it on your local drive and add relevant metadata. For instance: your name and rank as the person who wrote the report, the place where you wrote the report, the officers above you in the chain of command who will also have access to these files, or other information you deem necessary for future reference.

This is important because, at this point, early in your career, you are familiar with contextual information relevant to the interpretation of the report. Still, in a few years, when you retire, you may not remember these details. Plus, should you share your file with someone unfamiliar with the context in which you created the EPRs, they may need the metadata to understand its contents better. So, you now have a file saved to your local drive with relevant metadata. Now you copy it to the other locations where you want to keep copies of your collection, either local or remote, and then write the next EPR and repeat the previous steps.

Fast forward a few years. You are retired now. You want to leave some parts of your collection for your family, such as photos from your deployments or some journal entries, but not others. So, you already have the files that you want to keep in specific folders and those that you don’t want your family to see in a different one. For instance, your spouse and your children may not need to see the EPRs of your squadron members. You were asked about a specific report in your first year of retirement but nothing since. At this point, you create new copies of your collection, omitting the files you don’t want to leave behind. You remove the rest.

Taken together, this procedure is known as active collecting. You’ve worked through the preservation of your material throughout the life cycle of your records, from the planning stages, through creation, upkeep, and eventually, the destruction, partial or total, of the records. You’ve also considered how you want your information will be created, stored, potentially re-used, shared, archived, and possibly destroyed. You may notice that engaging in active collecting gives you a lot more control over how your information flows. In addition, the sooner in your career you begin engaging in active collecting, the more robust your collection will be. Remember, the first ideal moment to actively collect is when you joined the military service.

The second perfect moment is now!

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