On 02/23/12 5:48 PM, Florence Devouard wrote:
But the most difficult ennoying point is simply that most corp
archives appear to be a mess. Because companies are bought and sold,
information is lost on the way. Because of poor communication between
departments. Because staff come and go. And because the acceleration
of business processes unfortunately make it so that in the past dozen
of years, less and less time and money has been spent (invested) on a
proper archive system, on good procedures and efficient
implementation. So when you ask "can you retrieve the past 20 years of
sales regarding this yoghurt", you'll get a blank stare. Truth is, no
one knows the date and no one knows where to find the info.
Some companies sometimes hire external services (private historians)
to "clean up" their archives and some good stuff can get out of this,
such as a book or a museum (Michelin did that. Do visit the museum
http://www.aventure-michelin.com/ if you happen to come. It is very
nicely done).
Usually, I recommand good sense. If the information does not appear
"weird" or "controversial" at all, I use the corp information as
"trusted source". If it is clearly misleading or potentially illegal
info, I trash it. But in between there is room to accept the data as
long as there is another source, that may not be so great but that
appears independant. For large companies, there are usually
independant sources. But for most medium size companies, not. I give
the situation a certain degree of tolerance.
Difficult to put that into any sort of policy except for "good sense".
I'm not familiar with what might be available from Michelin, but there
are others (like the Hudson's Bay Company) who have made archives more
available.
For other companies hiring an external service can be a green light to
throw out the "garbage" so as to leave room to store more recent stuff.
Libraries do this too. The BBC's toss-out of Dr. Who episodes is
legendary. So many things that I buy have come from libraries looking
for the scrap value of material with an ex-libris label showing it was
the gift from some donor who thought it would stay with the library
forever. The pages are often uncut.
Corporate archives will frequently include reports to headquarters from
agents in the field in far-flung places. (The Wikileaks diplomatic
correspondence came from a huge network of such agents.) Many give a
unique perspective on events, and other sources to corroborate the
information don't exist. If they do exist they can either be too recent
to release without embarrassing someone, or too old to be easily found.
The amount of material that exists in various archives is beyond most of
our capacities to imagine, and perhaps even beyond the capacity of our
collective imagination. That's the biggest challenge to documenting the
sum of human knowledge. Waiting for historians or other "experts" to
provide reliable secondary sources simply won't work. What these experts
choose to write about is just as much a matter of whim as a volunteer's
choice of what to add to Wikipedia.
Oral citations are only one facet of the challenge. Wikipedia is only
one facet of the solution. Restructuring the epistemology requires a
larger vision than the one that gave us Wikipedia.
Ray
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