<does anyone have a suggestion on how I can explain to the records
contact in that area how to determine whether or not something someone
is retaining electronically should be listed on the retention schedule?>

Part of her confusion may be that she thinks in terms of documents (with
pages) as records and perhaps her electronic records consist primarily
of databases.  It took a while for me to get the concept of electronic
"record" across to our folks here.  Once I started speaking in terms of
database "objects" and tables, the light bulbs lit up.  For example -
our customer database has an object called "customer" (or business
partner) which consists of data from a variety of tables.  This object
is a record when all its component data is pulled together on a screen
(name, address, phone, payment history, bank account, customer type,
etc.).  Our retention is applied to the object as a whole based on an
event (final bill paid and customer terminated), not to the individual
tables that the data comes from.


Ginny Jones
(Virginia A. Jones, CRM, FAI)
Records Manager
Information Technology Division
Newport News Dept. of Public Utilities
Newport News, VA
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