Mounted search and rescue

["IRVIN LICHTENSTEIN" <ilichten1@verizon.net>]

Institutional memory is not just day to day operations stuff-- the website,
voicemail codes, pager operations should be common knowledge among members
and documented in SOG.

The real memory of an institution is the shared experiences of its members.
This means someone should be saving copies of newsletters, training and
publicity presentations, thank you letters, event flyers, and so forth. Even
basic records have to be saved and transferred to new custodians over time.
For those of you who do their own tax reporting and personnel record keeping
you need to maintain some paperwork as long as 30 years after the member
leaves the organization, regardless of how, by federal regulation.

In other cases it means that events and lessons learned fade from the group
and have to be relearned, sometimes more expensively than the first time. 
You also have to be aware that without records some people will claim to
have been there and done that before they were born, let alone before they
joined the organization. This leads to bruised egos and alienation among the
old hands and further loss of memory. 

Irv Lichtenstein 

-----Original Message-----
From: msar-riders-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:msar-riders-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Una Smith
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 11:36 AM
To: msar-riders@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [MSAR] Important: institutional memory