The original study has been lost

October 19, 2010 6:32 AM

Help me find the source of a common information. A recent blog post on this subject raised my interest in finding the source of an often cited Coopers & Librand study. It seems nobody is able to locate the original.

The study is famous for citing the time spent looking for documents, and amount of documents lost per year. You can see it cited here, and in countless powerpoints and presentation. It seems to be described often as "a study by Coopers & Lybrand / Lawrence Livermore Labs" and is sometimes dated 1998, sometimes 1987.

Where should I look to find the original study ? My google-books and google-scholar fu is failing me.

Thanks Hive Mind !

Note that I'm not interested in the reward mentionned in the blog post (being already an aiim member), but in actually figuring out the source, and possibly the methodology behind this

posted by motdiem2 to Society & Culture (2 answers total)

Try Google Books which gives a few differently sourced examples. Regardless, if you are talking about a report from 1998 regarding paper documents, it has to be horribly outdated and therefore doesn't bear mentioning. You may as well be talking about 5 1/4" floppy disk drives for data storage.
posted by JJ86 at 7:17 AM on October 19, 2010

Response by poster: thanks for the suggestion liketitanic - I've sent an e-mail to their reference desk service - I will update if I get an answer.

JJ86 - I have no doubt the data is oudated (and the method dubious to begin with). But believe it or not, it is still often cited as fact in business circles - so I'd really like to read the source material :)
posted by motdiem2 at 7:40 AM on October 19, 2010