Hi Christina,
I support the idea that the interview should go first.
The question is what do you mean under interview?
From my experience, you should start from "interviewing" THE BOSS - it is good if you will have 15 minutes to present the person in THE BOSS position your objectives and receive from THE BOSS letter that clear delegates you authority to conduct interview and to do every thing that you decide necessary.
I used word "THE BOSS", but it could be the Senior Management Team, the Leadership Team, or..., any way, the TOP of your College.
The document you need to get, should clear say that you have all rights to request the information you need to perform your JOB.
That Letter gives you right to interview THE BOSs, THE BOss, THE Boss, and simply the boss, every one according to its position in the orgchart.
Every boss will give you short introduction to its Kingdom, describe its position with the College, its importance and so on.
Listen to every one, it will help you to understand better who is who, and what records the person could have, offically and non-officially.
The Letter from the Top allows you to get access to Information that is probably considered "Confidential", or, at least, you will know that it does exist and under whom control, and why it is "confidential".
don't hesitate to ask about the person with the unit who holds title "Live History", or "our veteran, who knows every thing". It is possible that it could be one retired person who comes one day per week to do something, but who really knows "What" - Where" - What the Reason behind".
It is very important, and here I'm not kidding, to have good relations with ??? Facility and Property Management Staff. They are the people who are responcible for all rooms, aticks, basement, and other not known to every one hidden places with your College.
Also, make a good contact with Accounting personal - it is possible that long time ago the college rented some space somewhere and sent old papers and other stuff, continues to pay until now authomaticly without asking the questions - ammount not big, to start to ask questions - to call for problems; and you could be the person who can resolve that old issues.
Of course, before you Start, you probably check the Records Series that College must have according to different Legislations.
During the interview you will specify the questions accordingly: Registar - Students Records,
Accounting - ??? what they are doing, forgot somehow :-),
HR- they probably are doing with non-students :-), and they are the people who can ask you WHO YOU are and what do you thing by asking these QQQ at all ??? - here you will need to show them the letter from THE BOSS.
The form itself - I think you have few to start already.
My additions in this case are:
Ask not for Digital format, but for any format they have - probably College has paper , microfilm images, "old" - different types of magnetic media with the accounting information, personal information, and...,
and aslo back up tapes.
It is possible, that College uses other organisations that do business on behalf of the College - the same accounting, or collection of payments, or???. The same with Legal (Division) - do you have outside counsil?
Health Department - does it keeps all records that are created during the business activity, or it only coordinate the work and records b elong to medical services providers - ???
Be ready to face these different scenarios.
By the way, if you have division which is dealing with Procurement and Contracts, it can give you chance to know about the current and past providers who were and are working on behalf of the college, and after you can ask what happened with records.
Sorry, again too long.
Good luck and enjoy the title of " Our Treasures Keeper", or something else, but good, as in the articles that Peter provides in the RAINs.
Alex Babin
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--- On Mon, 2/28/11, Christina Zamon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Christina Zamon <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [RM] Records survey/inventory
To: [log in to unmask]
Received: Monday, February 28, 2011, 9:38 AM
This is a follow up question to the one I posted the other week about drafting an implementation plan. One of the tasks on my "to do" list is to "establish best practices for surveying/inventorying departmental records." Right now I'm thinking that just means draft some forms to use when I walk into an office to do an inventory but I feel like there should be more to it than that.
Right now I'm looking at the records management forms in the SAA/ARMA forms book in terms of drafting a form to do an inventory but do I also need to do an interview? I see forms for that as well.
Maybe I do an interview and then an inventory?
Does anyone have any advice on this front?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Christina J. Zamon
Head of Archives & Special Collections
Emerson College
(617) 824-8679
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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