# School adopts a household's frost test for its files

> A School of Emergent Priorities paper reports householders' reasons for throwing out an unlabelled freezer tub, and the School now applies the same frost test to its own unattributed files.

Thirty-seven households were asked to lift a tub from the bottom of the freezer
and say what would make it go. Their answers, published today by the School of
Emergent Priorities in "Ask Whoever Froze It", have become the School's rule for
the files on its shared drive that no one has claimed.

> Householders have a word for most of what is in a freezer and a shorter one
> for whatever nobody owns. Our part was to listen for the shorter one.
>
> --- Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities

The paper keeps the householders' own phrases as its codes. Most of them put the
question in terms of whose the tub was, with frost on the lid close behind, and
very few reached for a date. The School has carried the two commonest terms over
to its drive as the Frost Line: a file with no custodian that has passed one
review cycle unopened is cleared at the next, after a notice inviting whoever
saved it to come forward. Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist describes the
rule as "the households' measure, carried over as it was given".

The paper also compares notice windows of two, four and eight weeks across the
drive's unclaimed files, and the School has settled on the longest.

The adoption reflects the School's view that a rule goes down more easily when
someone has already kept it at home. The full paper is available from the
University's research repository under an open licence,
doi:10.5555/slop.ut7p2x.