Figure 2 - uploaded by Miriam Lips
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
Government agencies are becoming increasingly dependent on e-mail systems as communication and information transfer tools. Many e-mail messages contain information vital to the business of government, and therefore organisations need to manage the messages in accordance with managerial, legal, and democratic requirements. On a daily basis, governme...
Similar publications
The technological impact of the Internet gave birth to telemedicine that provides both the digitalization of patient’s medical records, and the coordination between different healthcare actors. Work in this domain has shown that the standard XML is one of solid supports for the specification of the structure and of the semantic of clinical informat...
The report is all about land record management in West Bengal, its performance and progress. In the report the authors have addressed major components of the central sponsored scheme, the National Land Record Modernization Programme and their execution in the State.
Corporate social responsibility is a modern approach to company management, which takes into account such important aspects as environment and society. The concept of social responsibility goes beyond the regulatory act requirements, putting more emphasis on human resources, the surrounding environments and relationships with the stakeholders. To e...
Citations
... Traditionally, records managers were tasked with assessing the value of paper-based records in order to preserve business-critical information, comply with regulations, and promote timely and effective information retrieval (Eastwood, 2004, p. 202). Today, the appraisal of the business value of information created by emergent technologies faces numerous challenges (Lips et al., 2008). These challenges are compounded by the added appraisal responsibilities that now rest with the unprepared employee rather than the skilled information manager. ...
Despite the growth of alternative means of electronic messaging, email continues to be a crucial business communication tool. In many organizations, it is common to find a large proportion of business-critical data in email form. However, as the volume of business-critical email continues to grow, conventional approaches for managing paper-based records of business value are increasingly unsuited to the digital realities. Yet effective approaches to automate the management of email are essential to ensure organizational efficiency, accountability and regulatory compliance. Our research aims to develop a model that characterizes information managers' context-specific email triage strategies for identifying emails of business value so that it can be applied to automatically classify email records. We conducted a pilot study of two information managers' email triage practices in two different contexts and develop machine-learning models of lexical and non-lexical features that are involved in the appraisal of business value. An experiment with a machine learning algorithm trained on about two hundred emails in two different business contexts indicates that the automation of email triage for identifying records of business value is highly context dependent and that automated classifiers must be trained to recognize “business value” specifically for that context.
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate how automatic classification can assist employees and records managers with the appraisal of e-mails as records of value for the organization.
Design/methodology/approach
The study performed a qualitative analysis of the appraisal behaviours of eight records management experts to train a series of support vector machine classifiers to replicate the decision process for identifying e-mails of business value. Automatic classification experiments were performed on a corpus of 846 e-mails from two of these experts’ mailboxes.
Findings
Despite the highly contextual nature of record value, these experiments show that classifiers have a high degree of accuracy. Unlike existing manual practices in corporate e-mail archiving, machine classification models are not highly dependent on features such as the identity of the sender and receiver or on threading, forwarding or importance flags. Rather, the dominant discriminating features are textual features from the e-mail body and subject field.
Research limitations/implications
The need to automatically classify corporate e-mails is growing in importance, as e-mail remains one of the prevalent recordkeeping challenges.
Practical implications
Automated methods for identifying e-mail records promise to be of significant benefit to organizations that need to appraise e-mail for long-term preservation and access on demand.
Social implications
The research adopts an innovative approach to assist employees and records managers with the appraisal of digital records. By doing so, the research fosters new insights on the adoption of technological strategies to automate recordkeeping tasks, an important research gap.
Originality/value
Our experiment show that a SVM classifier can be trained to replicate an expert's decision process for identifying e-mails of business value with a reasonably high degree of accuracy. In principle, such a classifier could be integrated into a corporate Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) to improve the quality of e-mail records appraisal.
