We are a small to mid-size foundation. Our practices require that all
e-mails for projects are dragged into our Stellent document management
system for these files. We do the same for invoices into SAP. Staff are
very conscientious in pulling these types of records into a
record-keeping system, but we'd like to help them with the remaining
documents in their in-boxes, and I don't see us putting a records
management application on top of our systems soon.
We'd like to recommend that they create 3 directory buckets (for which
they could create a number of subdirectories further categorization) --
one bucket for long-term business records, one for short-term business,
and one for personal e-mails that they wish to transfer off the system.
That way at least when they leave or it comes time for a records
management organizational day or get back to work in e-mail, they can
work with the long-term business record bucket to get things where they
belong instead of working with the thousands of records that accumulate
in their in-boxes. We have the Copernic search tool that can search
across subfiles in Outlook to find information, but wondered what others
without RMAs do to help "organize" e-mail for disposition? Thanks!
Cheryl
Records and Archives Analyst
-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Julie Luckevich
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2006 10:59 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [RM] RIM Rule of Thirds applied to electronic records, still
valid?
Hello fellow listservers
I noted with interest the recent discussion on how much time it would
take
to review 7000 emails for an FOI request.
We're interested in knowing if anyone has any experience in applying
that
old rule of thirds to electronic documents, in this case we were
thinking
just about standard office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint),
excluding
databases and emails. We figured it may be more like 40-40-20.
For those of you not familiar with the rule, it says that, when applying
a
retention schedule to an area that has not had any purging or
classification
done in quite some time (or ever), one third of the records can be
destroyed, one third can be sent to storage, and one third is what you
actually use (active records).
Given the trend for people to move more and more to just printing the
hardcopy for reference then discarding it, I'm also wondering if this
rule
still applies to paper.
Anyone care to venture an opinion or share their experiences?
Our particular situation is applying retention to shared network drives
that
have been in existence for many years. We're also interested in any
ratios
of official to transitory records that anyone may have, in relation to
email
or network drives. We recently passed a new records retention by-law
with a
definition of transitory records, and we've been telling people to
delete
transitory emails for quite some time, but are there any studies out
there
that measure the relative proportion of junk to records to be saved?
That old rule of thirds was proven true again and again. Anyone want to
hazard a guess if it still applies?
Julie Luckevich
Supervisor, Corporate Records and Information
Regional Municipality of York
Newmarket, Ontario Canada
[log in to unmask]
http://www.region.york.on.ca
1-877-464-9675
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