Well, I knew this would come up sooner or later.  I just hoped I would be better prepared when it did.  

Background:  In 1996 the state created an office within state archives to help local governments manage their records, along with a committee to meet quarterly to review and approve retention schedules submitted by or through that office.  Ideally, fine.  Reality, it's a one-man office.  Once the core schedules were approved, he's spent more and more time directly helping the smaller cities and counties sort through their years of records, since only a few counties and cities have formal records managers.  The committee now rarely meets.  In the meantime we can't dispose of any unscheduled records.  Correspondence, including e-mail, hasn't yet been scheduled.  

Our situation:  Our minimal Internet policy, developed by IT, doesn't address e-mail retention.  Since e-mail goes through the main server directly to the user's PC, most people I've seen either save everything or delete everything.  Most people consider records management to involve only the old boxes and books in storage (what else is new?).  

I was eating lunch yesterday when a "roving meeting" moved into the lunchroom.  It was among our IT head, our imaging system's vendor, his IT head and two people from the ECM software company they use, discussing an e-mail archiving system.  I listened in, then inquired about it with both our IT head and our vendor's IT head later.  The good news is that the archive will save only one copy of every e-mail coming or going through the server; the bad news is that they believe that we must save every e-mail forever.  They haven't gotten to retention issues yet, but didn't agree with my opinion on the matter ("The courts say you must save everything," they said).  

I know we shouldn't be deleting emails that could be considered records until we get retention schedules, but in the meantime I see no need to save junk mail, personal mail, Listserv mail and such.  I need something in writing from a reliable source to show them that we don't have to save everything and shouldn't save most e-mail beyond a certain point ("normal course of business").  And, unfortunately, that has to be more "official" than a Listserv response from Larry or Peter.  I've found two books in the ARMA bookstore, "E-Mail Rules" -- one author is a consultant to the software vendor -- and the ANSI/ARMA standard "Requirements for Managing Electronic Messages as Records."  Can anyone recommend something that would directly address the court issue?  

Tim Barnard, Records Management Clerk
Harrison County, Mississippi
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Phone (228) 865-4121 Fax (228) 865-4140

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