Dave

Annoyingly, email bounce is one of the things you may lose; many email system managers regard them as an evil because of their potential uses as identity probes. For me, that has meant that a number of rarely used services have failed to get in contact with me on some significant matters, which has proved quite a problem from time to time. For these reasons, I do strongly recommend a separate personal email identity from the institutional one. Note, this isn’t easy to manage, as many things can slide between personal and work spaces. And of course it doesn’t make the pain go away completely; at some point you will likely need to change your personal email provider (eg when you decide that Google is too high risk, or have reduced service sufficiently), and then you have reduced the problem to the one you failed to solve adequately before!

The pain is ameliorated somewhat by having an active online identity – blog, Twitter and social network of your choice, as people can catch up with your there. But still, for years afterwards, people will be getting bounces from your ‘old’ address, either because they don’t talk to you often or because it is still stuck somewhere in the bowels of their e-mail client and pops up as a ‘valid’ address when they CC you.

When I retired just over two years ago, I wanted to continue in an unpaid capacity to foster the development of social media within the institution. I even, at that stage, considered registering for a higher degree to do do some research on cultural change and barriers to adoption of social media – that never came to fruition, and it was never declared to anyone else. Within the institution there were a number of honorary titles that could be granted, I applied for one of these and was successful. As a result my use of institutional services continues unbroken.

I would add that (as I recall, it may have changed) my former institution did allow retirees the ability to continue to access library resources upon personal application, and to keep their email addresses, again upon application. That seems a sensible policy as it makes the break at the end of your “working life” that little less abrupt. From my experience, I have only on a couple of times wanted to access past emails, and even on those occasions I could quite legitimately have said “sorry, can’t get to old emails” and no-one would too seriously have been distressed or inconvenienced. That’s probably because through my working life I’ve never stored anything I really valued on an institutional server alone; that brings me on to digital literacy, I somehow think in this situation, that term is more appropriate than information literacy.

I applaud your slideshare presentation. Most timely and I can support all the things that you raise. Can I just re-affirm the principle that it is the individual’s responsibility to preserve their digital footprint. Yes, you might expect the institution to have a consideration for your lifetime’s achievements, but you cannot guarantee it. Therefore you must from the outset, in the world we live in now, manage your identity, your future and your legacy yourself.

So, having set up your own domains and your own servers (I did, but perhaps I’m in the nerdy chapter of retirees), you do take posts from your institutional blog that you thought were important – perhaps not intrinsically in themselves, but illustrative of the thought process that led you to … wherever – and you re-post them with a header note describing the context and original date of posting, perhaps.

Prior to that of course you will, won’t you, have set up an identity in the cloud that’s separate from the institutional identity that you’ve had, and increasingly you’ll use this one, not the institutional services that are provided for you. Remember, it’s much easier to draw stuff in through the institutional firewall, than to get stuff out to the outside world. Collaboration software is a case in point, but I won’t go there.

My experience of living in the cloud is that life has continued, as ever, because that’s what I’d got used to before I retired. Perhaps that’s the most important lesson for the pre-retirement/redundancy digital literacy course – parallel working and evaluation of cloud services that will survive. [I must admit that whilst Posterous shutting-down just caused a shrug of the shoulders, a download and then an upload into a new service; the demise of Google Reader shook me rigid, but again a couple of days later, I'd moved on.] So, I’m much more “mainstream” cloud than I was before; I’m more cautious – because at the end of the day … it’s just a service. I don’t experiment as much as I used to, but I focus on tasks and processes when asked to give advice on how to get something done. That’s what others in my position should be instructed in when approaching the break with their institution. What is it that you want to do today, a good digital literacy programme would sort that.

With regard to a couple of points I note from your talk (1) I have not missed at all my email/docs database, I regarded that work as belonging to the institution. I have missed colleagues but realised over a Christmas drink that I had moved on but they had not – my role was to tell them there was life after edu. (2) As for recreating identity, particularly online I have experimented as discovered there is much to the adage that very few contribute on the net. (3) I use the word “retired” carefully, you seldom have to declare the topmost line in your CV – most judge by appearances.

Phase 1: 30 day grace period “You should use this time to ensure that you have copied any email off the service if you want it preserved.”
Phase 2: 90 day suspension period, when the account exists but is locked
Phase 3: 121 days later, the account is closed. “Any email forwarding instructions you had in place will be removed, and anyone mailing your old University address will receive a bounced message informing them that your account does not exist. Any email left in your account on the server will be deleted… However, if you are a member of staff and you want email forwarding to continue then your School or department can authorise email forwarding from your Edinburgh alias address. (i.e your “yourname@ed.ac.uk” email address).”

I don’t know if this policy still applies, but it seems to me to be reasonably well balanced. I used IMAP so I had all my important email on my laptop. I guess there’s another issue there…

From a records management point of view, I believe many IT Service policies are far too cavalier about deleting email accounts that may contain significant institutional records (in terms of evidence of decision-making).

The email process above would apply to anyone leaving (unless dismissed under a serious cloud). But I’m pretty sure there is much less support for those facing redundancy. In the past, redundancy was not common in universities, but they are having to be much more ruthless these days, so I hope that institutions do put better support in place.

BTW I don’t think you mentioned one important thing we have discussed before that I missed. There are a few significant services, including one the Google Scholar variants, that require an institutional email address before you can sign up, even if they allow you to change to a personal email address later. It’s worth making sure you’re signed up to as many of these as possible. And if you _can_ get an institutional alumni-type email address, it’s probably worth doing.