<Their view (NOT mine), is that we need to find some way to minimize the
categories to .... say five (5). ... Records Managers do not classify
records into exceptionally narrow categories because they "want to">

Functional records retention schedules have been around for 30 or more
years and work well in lieu of specific detailed schedules set up solely
by office or division or department.  Still, they do result in many
retention items because of the four values (fiscal, legal, business
need, and potential historic) used to determine them.  I do not believe
in extreme big bucket retention schedules AS CURRENTLY PROPOSED in the
IT world. It is invariably based on applying the retention to date
entered or date of last access or date of last modification, or based on
the similar activity of another record that is linked to the record to
be archived or purged.  That said, I have to agree that we could
considerably reduce the number of retention items IF we could get
current and future software to more clearly work from an authorized
event date entered by the user or system generated based on other record
activity when applying retention.  

For example, Waterworks has 8 types of state and federal permits we must
maintain in order to be in the water business.  Each of these permits
have reporting and monitoring/testing requirements that all result in
records of some type.  The 8 permit regulations set retentions that vary
from "3 years after expiration" (permits good for 1 to 5 years depending
on the permit) to "until revoked" which could mean centuries.  The
regulations also set report and monitoring/test result retentions that
range from "3 years after report/test date" to "3 years after expiration
of permit" to "life of permit."  Conceivably, these requirements could
result in two retention periods for EDMS purposes - "3 years after event
date" (where the event date is the expiration of the permit [entered by
the user] or the date of the report or test [generated by and thus
entered by the system]) and "30 days after revocation date" (where the
revocation date is entered as the event date).  

For hard media records (paper, disks, CDs, etc.) we would still have to
be specific on listing the "event" as part of the retention (for example
"3 years after expiration of permit").  This can change in the future
with better retention/event tracking processes and better education of
the users.

Ginny Jones
(Virginia A. Jones, CRM, FAI)
Records Manager
Information Technology Division
Newport News Dept. of Public Utilities
Newport News, VA
[log in to unmask]

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance