By way of brief introduction:  I have posted before, but it is on a rare 
occasion.  I am however, a frequent lurker.  As a very “green” RM, I have 
found this forum to extremely insightful, helpful, and often times quite 
amusing…

Now my question:

Recently a staff member approached me with a question regarding a 
situation in which permanent records were stored on the same roles of 
microfilm as records that had met their retention.  They wanted to digitize 
the microfilm (for ease of use and retrieval), but did not want to weed out 
the non-permanent records, nor be responsible for those non-permanent 
records since they had reached their retention.  I sort of took the all or 
nothing approach: If you do want to sort through them, and you want to 
keep them all, you have to be responsible for, and maintain, all of those 
records (permanent retention or not).

I just got an email yesterday saying that, when asked, an official at the 
State Archives told this staff member:  “we could just keep the entire film 
and just mark it as "perm".  I could fill out my destruction form and sign-
off to show all other cases (non-perm) were gone due to retention.”

For some reason this doesn’t sit well with me. Authorize and sign off on 
the destruction of records, which in fact you are knowingly retaining 
permanently?? 

I supposed this is better than the opposite: destroying records without 
the authorization, however it still seems to be incongruent with Best 
Practices, if you will.

Any advice, words of wisdom, or related experience would be greatly 
appreciated!!

(And would it matter if they were criminal justice records…?)


Much thanks,

Sara Rusher
City of Longmont, Colorado
Records Manager
[log in to unmask]
303.651.8648

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