>I agree that, as a professional association, ARMA does not have a
>charter to police the vendor community.  

I won't state my opinion on what I think should be done here, because my
policy is to avoid these issues in the first place by structuring a contract
to avoid them, and if they do occur to fight my own battles.  Should ARMA be
responsible for doing this?  Well, my logic on the issue is presented below.


>HOWEVER, ARMA can be the venue
>for best practices for records practitioners, and have indeed addressed
>records storage best practices with two standards - "Guideline for
>Evaluating Offsite Records Storage Facilities" and "Records Center
>Operations, 2nd Ed."  This particular issue most certainly should be
>addressed in the next revision of these standards.  

This is addressed to a degree in the first document, but it is only a
Guideline and is intended primarily for others to extract the salient
content from it and use that as either a tool to perform a gap analysis by
evaluating their own storage facilities and procedures, or to use to
evaluate potential commercial service providers prior to entering into
contractual negotiations.  It doesn't address detailed terms of service in
depth, because there were too many to cover- but it does list a number of
items that should be included in SLAs and T&Cs.

The second document, which is an ANSI TR, was last revised in 2002 and
again, is designed more as a tool for establishing and operating an in-house
record center.  It has a minimal amount of information on moving to a
commercial facility, but one of the items it states is "Ensure existing
boxes are in good condition- replace or repair boxes prior to the move" and
there is a form for determining potential costs.  And this document is
definitely due for a revision.

I'm not sure if future revisions to either of these ARMA documents should
provide guidance on how to deal with this issue of re-boxing or other
contractual terms and issues.  If ARMA feels they shouldn't be the one
responsible for addressing how this is dealt with, then the guidance should
come in an ARMA publication.

It would seem to me that if a professional association (or any other body)
elects to publish guidance under their name stating how something should be
done, then they should also be willing to take a stand when a service
provider acts contrary to the published guidance to oppose it.

Larry
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