Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 113
HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS
upon which the MHD continued to collect. Our collection focused on USARCENT’s operations against IS, the
Afghanistan retrograde, and activities throughout the
USCENTCOM area of responsibility. We collected from
the command’s portal (SharePoint), network shared drive,
and e-mail distribution lists. We collected briefing slides,
orders (e.g., operation orders, FRAGOS, or execution
orders), operational updates, messages, requests for forces,
reports, key personnel lists, information papers, after-action reports, maps, and photographs.19
Collecting digital documents is a time-consuming,
manual process that requires viewing thousands of
gather a large volume of documents in a short amount
of time, the methodology needs to be simple and flexible.
Therefore, we followed the convention most MHDs use,
which is a hybrid approach of maintaining documents’
original integrity, but also reorganizing relevant documents together. We organized our collection first by the
command generating the document, then by type (e.g.,
all FRAGOs of a command were grouped together) or by
the staff section that produced the document.
Establish coordination procedures. Final disposition of our collection required sending copies to
CMH and USARCENT.20 Standard procedure calls
Data fields (with sample data)
Main
section
Subsection
Sub-subsection
1
Ops staff
G-3
2
Ops staff
3
Ops staff
Folders
Value
Baseline
date
Frequency
Date last
collected
G-33, products
High
23 Sept 2018
Daily
30 Sept 2018
G-3
G-33, documents
High
18 Sept 2018
Daily
30 Sept 2018
G-3
G-33, orders
High
18 Sept 2018
Daily
30 Sept 2018
(high, medium,
or low)
(daily, weekly,
or monthly)
Table. Basic Collection Matrix Example
individual files and deciding whether to add them to the
collection. Because we were establishing a baseline collection upon which the follow-on MHDs would continue
to build, we spent a lot of time mining USARCENT’s
SharePoint portal and shared drives for relevant documents and reconstructing their file structure and metadata. Having access to e-mail distribution lists made
collection maintenance easier.
To help build the collection and remember where,
when, how regularly, and what types of documents to
collect, we created a simple matrix in Microsoft Excel.
Because the portal and share drive were sprawling, this
enabled us to build the collection methodically and avoid
duplication. The collection matrix also helped us identify
and prioritize locations to revisit as new documents were
generated. The table illustrates the basic metadata fields
as column headings and sample data for three folders,
or locations, listed on separate rows (the actual number
would be much higher).
One methodological issue Army historians and
MHDs face is whether to maintain documents’ original organizational structure or to reorganize them
into specific collections. Because collection efforts often
MILITARY REVIEW January-February 2017
Notes
On e-mail
distribution
(Graphic by author)
for saving documents on external media (e.g., hard
disk drives or DVDs) and mailing these via official
mail.21 Mailing the collection, rather than transferring the data over a network connection, is done for
several reasons. First, there is the volume of data. We
collected seventy gigabytes in five weeks; the typical MHD collects many times this amount during a
nine- or twelve-month deployment. Second, there
are technical issues beyond a historian’s control: the
bandwidth of Army networks is limited, moving data
across Army network domains is difficult, and there
are infrastructure limitations at CMH. Nevertheless,
mailing the data imposed its own difficulties and
required close coordination with the command’s security manager, information assurance office, and official
post office to ensure we complied with security and
information assurance requirements.
Prepare a transition plan. Finally, we prepared a
transition plan for the 161st Military History
Detachment (Georgia Army National Guard).
We had hoped to conduct a relief in place in early
October 2014, but unforeseen complications meant
they did not arrive until January 2015. Therefore,
111