Re:  Bill Roach's comments:

"Throwing them in big buckets simply because we don't believe our employees are competent enough to select from the very small subset of categories that actually relate to their work is demeaning to the employees."

An EDRMS vendor recently gave me a demo of his product.  Each department was limited to the record types related to that department with drop-down lists to choose from, all customizable.  It seemed logical to me.  

Re:  Fred Grevin's comments:

"And sure enough, the current IT practice with respect to email is to keep everything. "Storage is cheap", they say."

This weekI watched another vendor demo of an EDMS product with our IT personnel and some other end users.  At the end I asked if it had retention capabilities.  The vendor's response was not really an answer (when I looked on their website later, it does), but our IT head said she could understand retention periods for paper records, but when you can copy old information onto a CD, why worry about disposing it?  

Now I know why capturing and storing all e-mail forever (see "RM vs. IT" from last month) wasn't a problem to her.  

Tim Barnard, Records Management Clerk
Harrison County, Mississippi
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Phone (228) 865-4121 Fax (228) 865-4140

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