Looking After Your Memories

As a retired Data Management Professional my role is to work with the team to understand exactly what we want to achieve, then propose and implement relevant technology solutions.

This means thinking about how we work together when we can’t meet, how we can properly control and protect the personal data we need to collect, and how we ensure that all of the output has a proper home so the hard work does not get lost!

As we have a limited time and a finite budget we needed to look for solutions that will carry on when the project team is disbanded. We are therefore very grateful to the Droitwich Spa Heritage Centre for agreeing to be custodians of the output so it is available for future generations.

With this in mind we have been careful to think through and plan our approach before we started with actual interviews so that we can say with confidence how your input will be looked after and managed. To give an example a web page needs an owner to pay the regular fees, upgrade the software etc and we know that we will not have an ongoing team which is why the outputs section (including these blogs) is held on the Heritage Centre website.

Social media is key to getting the word out and we quickly established a Facebook page and Twitter account which are actually owned by a combination of SOBBS and the Heritage Centre and engaged a web designer to create an informational web page. We have added a YouTube site too which will contain various outputs, this again is owned by the Heritage Centre so that it will not become obsolete.

Data privacy has been a key factor right from the beginning and we ensure that contact details are kept only in one place locked behind a password.

As a professional with 30 years’ experience in this field it has been a pleasure to be able to ensure that we get it right from the start instead of trying to pick up the pieces later as, all too often in projects, everyone has their own (perfectly good but different) way of saving information which creates an inconsistent jumble and valuable digital assets can get lost!

As we are a group of individuals using our own technology everyone has a subtly different set up, for instance at least three different email systems are in use. I am happy to have been useful by helping tweak team members set ups, sharing my knowledge through training and fixing problems. It’s good when you receive positive feedback like “Ah! I’ve always wanted to know how to do that!”.