LBSC 671 - Creating Information Infrastructures
Spring 2014 - Section 0101
Assignment G3 - Life Cycle Analysis

As is the case for people, the things that we find in collections (documents and other records) are created, they have rich lives, and they eventually pass from the scene. In this assignment you will describe the life cycle of the items in your collection.

Simply add this assignment to your wiki page, under the previous assignment. Don't change any assignment after the due date, of course. By the time you get to the end of the semester, you will have one wiki page that contains all your assignments.

Although we call it a life cycle, there actually is a begining and an end. In the beginning, information is created for some purpose, by some entity, in some way. So you should start by describing how your information comes into existence. For example, the flight plans for Apollo 15 were prepared before the mission by the mission planning and analysis division of the NASA Manned Spaceflight Center, and their purpose was to allow mission control and the flight crew to ensure that specific activities were completed at the appropriate time during a mission. They resulted from a set of planning meetings in which mission activities were decided upon. The public affairs transcripts of mission communication, by contract, were created during the mission by the Public Affairs Office of the Manned Spaceflight Center for use by the press. The were prepared by typists from recordings of the public affairs audio, which included both spacecraft communications and public affairs commentary. You should provide similar information (creator, purpose, process) for each significant type of information in your collection (for practical reasons, limit yourself to no more than 5 major types of information).

The information in your collection will be used for some purpose(s) by someone, so the next stage in a life cycle analysis is to say who will use it and what they will use it for. For example, the flight plans were used during the mission by the Flight Activities Officer to advise the flight director on upcoming activities, and they were used after the mission by the Mission Planning and Analysis Division as a reference for planed activities when preparing post-flight mission reports. Note that one of these uses was the intended use, and the other was a use that was made of the information that had not originally been the purpose for creating it. Such cases are very common, and you should do your best to identify them (as another example, the USA conducts a census every 10 years to allocate political representation, but social scientists study census information to learn about social phenomena). In the second part of this assignment, you should list the actual (or expected) uses of the information in your collection.

In parallel with use, the information may be revised or changed. For example, this course Web site changes each week as I add new assignments, tweak readings, and correct errors. The Apollo 15 flight plan was changed by the flight activities officer during the flight as events (e.g., midcourse correct engine firings) were canceled, added (e.g., a return to a drill site to pick up a core tube), or modified (e.g., shortening the time at a geology stop). Some material never changes (note that we are not talking about unintentional changes like yellowing paper here), others change constantly (e.g., airline reservation systems). You should describe how each major type of information in your collection changes during its period of use.

After the information is no longer in regular use, something needs to be done with it. It might be destroyed, it might be kept for some defined period or until some event happens, it might be kept indefinitely (as a permanent record), or it might simply be abandoned in place (e.g., left on the hard drive of a computer that is taken out of service). Abandoning is often a bad idea because of the potential for misuse of information once it is no longer in control of the institution, however. So it is important to think of what should happen to each type of information when it ends its period of regular use. For example, one copy of the Apollo 15 PAO transcript was retained indefinitely by the NASA Johnson Space Center History Office, and the Flight Activity Officer's copy of the Apollo 15 flight plan was retained indefinitely by the National Archives and Records Administration Fort Worth Federal Records Center. Note that the custodian of information may change when information is dispositioned, and note also that more than one copy of the same information may be retained (often by different organizations, for different reasons). For each major type of information in your collection, describe the event that causes dispositioning, and what that disposition was (or will be).

Note that you may not know some of the answers to these questions. That's okay -- just make a reasonable assumption in such cases, and include a note to indicate that what you are reporting is your opinion, not a fact. Of course, this will always be the case when dealing with the future, since facts about what will happen in the future are hard to come by!

You should use no more than about 2 pages for this assignment -- the goal is not to get you to write -- it is to get you to think!