"Documents validating the destruction of your records should/must be kept
permanently, just in case. "

I suspect that the following is a minority opinion among records managers/analysts.

I must take exception to the above.  No records manager would allow anyone to retain records "just in case".  Why would we give ourselves that liberty when we fuss mightly at other business groups that want to do the same thing?
'Just in case' is not a reason for retaining anything.  What is the business purpose?  Even in the non-business world there is a business case for retention.  Some rational argument that the record are meaningful to the organization for a certain period of time.
If the records are truly permanent, then they are of archival value and should be managed using archival techniques.

It has always been puzzling to me that we would worry so much about documenting what is probably less than 10% of the total volume of records that are destroyed in an organization.  Do you make your customers docuement every e-mail that is deleted?  or the annual office clean out when mega volumes of records, documents, notes, memos, copies, research are tosses with no record?  I would be very suspecious if you said yes.

I can see some reasonable period of time to retain destruction records, but probably no more than about 10 years.

It seems to me that there are three reasons why we as records managers can't find stuff.
1  It was never controlled in the first place.  That is it was never placed within the context of a records management program.
2  We entered it in the program (storage) and it was properly destroyed following due diligence and our business rules.
3  We had it and we can't find it.  That is our records management program is/was not robust enough when the organization migrated to a new system or our procedures weren't explicit enough that customers didn't enter in the management system enough metadata that we could search and find the records at a later date.  or our tracking systems were lacking.

Tom Owens
Records Analyst

The above carries the normal disclimers in that all this foolishness is of my own invention and does not reflect the policies, procedures or standards of any organization that I have worked for Past, Present or future.

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