AnneMarie -

I strongly suggest that you contact the Archives of Ontario, the lead
RIM agency for your province.

You will find their online Recorded Information Management (RIM)
publications at:

 http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/rimdocs/index.html

I would specifically recommend "Fact Sheet #7: Electronic Records: What
About E-Mail?", available at:

http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/english/rimdocs/rim7.htm

...and that you  contact Jim Suderman, Program Coordinator, Electronic
Records(STRATEGIC BUSINESS SOLUTIONS) by email at
[log in to unmask] or by phone at 416-327-1530.

It is my impression that Jim will encourage you NOT to auto-archive your
email.  Also, the Management Board folks have been working for years on
enterprise-wide R/DMS guidelines.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

Mark

G. Mark Walsh
Records & Information Analyst
Records Management and Imaging Services
Library of Virginia
(804) 692-3650

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Annemarie Toth-Waddell
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 9:54 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: E-mail management- best practices

Hello everyone,

Staff here at the Assembly are looking for guidance on how to
effectively manage their e-mail so I'm now working with our IT
department and our Information management coordinator to develop some
best practices.  I've been doing a fair amount of research on this and
it seems that organizations have a wide range of policies on how to do
this best.  We don't have an RDIMS so we're in a situation where staff
need to make a decision about which e-mail messages to keep and where to
file them.  I believe the best option is to recommend they keep e-mail
messages electronically by saving them as message files with a .msg file
extension so as to preserve the integrity of the record and any possible
attachments.  Do others agree this is the best thing to recommend?

Also, our IT department thinks there might be legislation that tells
them how long to keep e-mail on their servers.  I'm sure there isn't
since retention depends on content not format, but I'm still in the
process of contacting people who will be able to confirm this for me.

Lastly, I know staff are interested in archiving their e-mail.  Does
anyone have any tips on how this can best be done using MS Outlook?
When you choose to auto archive, I believe the archive ends up on your
c: drive which isn't a safe place to store files.  I'm concerned though
that if we tell staff to archive to a network server, we will end up
overloading the servers with useless records.

Any advice would be appreciated!  I hope someday to be able to return
the favour as I gain more experience in this field.

Annemarie
Annemarie Toth-Waddell
Information Access Manager & RIM Manager for the Legislative Assembly,
Information Resources Branch, Legislative Library of the Legislative
Assembly of Ontario,
(416) 314-8515
Fax (416) 314-8541
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