[Year 12 Its] Re: Internal documentation

[Charmaine Taylor]

This is my last contribution as I have more immediate problems to attend 
to, like teaching...
The analogies to biographies are invalid. Biographies by definition are 
secondary sources; only an autobiography can be a primary data source of 
a person's life.

Secondary data sources are a sources that have processed, interpreted, 
or manipulated (in the sense of organising to suit a particular bias) 
primary data.
The crime witness statements are primary data because they are direct 
evidence of an event, despite the fact that there may be several 
different observations of the event. A news report of a crime event is 
secondary data because the reporter has collected witness statements and 
processed and interpreted them to provide a summary for readers. If the 
reporter works for a particular newspaper he/she may even manipulate the 
data eg the headline "Another burglary in town" has a quite different 
connotation from the headline "Crime wave! - Second burglary in a week!'

Now, as to technical documentation - the instructions about how to 
maintain a program/application or computer that are supplied with the 
software or hardware. I reckon it is primary data as it is provided by 
the creator of the program/application (regardless of whom they employed 
to write it because it has to be approved by the creators). If similar 
documentation is written for that equipment by another source eg 'DOS 
for Dummies' then that is secondary data because the author is working 
from the primary data source and does not have the privileged 
information available to insiders.  Quite often, of course, the 
secondary data is better written but that is not the point.
I would be interested to hear the views of other examiners but I fear we 
have spent too much time already on this. I hope the people on the VCE 
IT Reaccreditation Committee have taken note of how much time has been 
devoted to this tiny topic!!

Ciao,
Charmaine Taylor
Sunbury Downs College

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