Barry wrote: " ... retention should be applied regardless of the media.
If I have an e-mail request or a phone call, a walk in, or paper form,
shouldn't the retention be applied to each equally?"

I suppose so, however in our case, the "record" copy of circulation
activity is what is in our database, not the request itself.  We made
the decision for the database to be the authority for circulation (who
has it, when was it checked out, etc.) rather than the request forms (a
decision which also lends to the reason why we only keep the forms for a
short period).  Your organization would have to buy in to the concept of
the RM database being the authority though - a feat that required a lot
of hard work convincing our customers that the records center is, in
fact, NOT a black hole!

I can certainly see, in Larry's situation as well as others, where
requiring use of a form and maintaining those forms would be valuable.
However, in my environment, being a single location law firm with approx
300 employees, our process doesn't need to be as complex as others
might.  The audit trail that Larry mentions is represented in the
history of activities in our database and has been sufficient for our
needs, including addressing requests from all communication channels.
Again, though, your organization would have to buy into that.

Last, I totally agree with Larry that space should be near, if not at,
the bottom of the list of drivers for setting retention periods; and for
us, after balancing our specific requirements and risks associated with
the proposed process, we determined that we had sufficiently met our
needs with a shorter retention and have thus avoided having to find
alternative storage ... at least for now!

;)  Julie

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