However, in the past week, two organizations to which I belong have experienced the loss of organizational knowledge because a binder with paper documents was lost, misplaced, or thrown away.
We have a church administrator who is very organized and she keeps everything you need in a binder and most of those binders are at her finger tips. I asked her a question yesterday and within 2 minutes she found the information for me from five years of history in our church newsletter. She pulled out five binders, flipped to the correct month and found the information for me. I wonder if we could have done this search as quickly digitally. Probably with a good search function we could have. Yes, and there is something about seeing the hardcopy which is a different experience.
I think about this as well, as I sort my pictures and try to put them into some kind of order. My digital ones are all by year and month, but hard to search, BECAUSE there are so many of them. Some of my non-digital photos are in photo albums, and the experience of searching through for a specific one is just a different experience. Touching those old photos brings me back in a way that viewing on a screen does not.
So I really sound like an old fogey but I miss hardcopy sometimes and I hope to find some of those lost binders, because I know there will be valuable information, we might need for a future task.
