Files from the dead and information in-memoriam

Somehow a funny caption seems inappropriate.

An excellent article here at gizmodo.co.uk stopped me in my tracks today. The author tells of a job reading, reviewing, summarising and then destroying files within a social security department of a local authority. For 18 months the author waded through a vast room of literally thousands of files, the files of children who had died in the care of that local authority. The dead room as it was known. Anyone who has worked in legal RM or for any hospital records unit or for any local authority will have a taste of what this is like, though not the distilled horror of reading bland summaries of dreadful circumstances. The mere thought of this job gave me a palpable feeling of dread and a cold sweat.

When I first started as a clerk for a city law firm, it was very much paper based and being drawn into the content of the file was a daily hazard. Coming across files of tragedy, horror and heartbreak was relatively common and one learned to “Just close the file” to protect one’s sanity on certain cases.  This phenomenon does still appear in the purely electronic world, I was speaking to a candidate yesterday and he described the moment when he realised what the data he was inputting represented, real lives, real stories, abstracted to codes and numbers as part of a cancer drug study. However, in the main, as modern information professionals we tend to be somewhat insulated from the content and meaning of the files we manage. This protects us somewhat from the reality of what we work with but does engender a slightly blasé attitude to our content. There are a lot of records systems out there which are little better than “fire and forget” filing cabinets or “the system as a skip” places to bury things at the end of the transaction. We forget that for every file there is usually a need, potentially a story and occasionally a life.

I’ve met a lot of information professionals who believe in the auto-delete as defacto approach in all circumstances. It’s a seductive notion and in some of the more, shall I say, buccaneering parts of the economic world, not one without merit. But the lives of dead children deserve more. The last paragraph of the article is particularly affecting, how a large fraction of the files were destroyed without summary to save money and space. I doubt this is an isolated event across the UK. Destroy the file to save money. Not to reduce risk, not to improve services. To save money, money which is undoubtedly well spent of course, but in a world where storage of electronic files now costs pennies per giga byte and the remaining hard copy files are often held in forgotten basements which are impossible to repurpose, what is the real cost of holding certain types of files forever? I don’t mean a record of glorious successes either. We learn little of import from success. I mean the other sorts. Like the files of dead children. The files around important mistakes. The stories of malfeasance in high places. The minutiae of failure held ready for inspection by historians and analysts of the future.

No one now has the resources to open and summarise files like these if they do have to be destroyed and no one seems to be willing to pay for counselling and therapy for the clerical staff who’d have to do it either. There are technological solutions for already electronic files, content analytics and just keeping it are possible approaches. For paper files though, the barrier of digitisation seems insurmountable, perhaps that’s a tragedy in itself, the fading of all those bytes held in paper, forever beyond economic reach. In any event, summary deletion and destruction seems to be the mood of the day in all economic sectors. Only user generated and system harvested information appears to proliferate and pool, ready for the soft caress of the analytics engines to draw their own cold, unemotional correlations and conclusions.

But for a large proportion of the children in this article, and many others, no summary or record of these, undoubtedly, tragic lives now exists. No record of beyond a flat entry in a register, no context, no memorial informatica. If over-bureaucracy can be horrific in the classical Kafkaesque sense, complete lack of information has a more compelling, lasting and ultimately soul destroying dread if one ponders the issue for long enough.