Practices and pain points in personal records

Introduction. This paper reports the findings of a survey on personal electronic records management practices focussing on records that people deal with in their everyday lives at home. The aim of this research was to determine which personal electronic records practices were most effective in averting oversights and generating satisfaction in participant’s records management practices. This paper presents one stage of a broader design science research program. Method. The research for this paper was conducted by means of an online questionnaire using Qualtrics software and participants were recruited through social media. Analysis. Analysis was conducted using tabular analysis in SPSS, and Principal Component Analysis in R. Results. The research found that there is a statistical relationship between the practices that respondents adopted with their personal electronic records management and their level of satisfaction with that process. For example, respondents who saved records on a computer or in the cloud reported higher levels of satisfaction with how they managed their personal records and experienced fewer adverse incidents such as losing documents or failing to pay bills on time. Conclusion. The paper concludes by identifying some specific personal records management practices that are likely to improve satisfaction with that task, such as saving and sorting records that need to be retained outside of email in a structured filing system.