Hi Dawn,
Disclaimer: I am not a federal records manager and don't know if NARA has
already issued guidance or covers this in their certificate program. I agree
that the licenses should be managed somewhere.
I'd start with the life of the product if there is one - in other words, if
it's a 12-month site license, I'd go with 12 months + maybe another 1-2
years.
If there is no set licensing period, another approach is useful life of the
application. In other words, if DVA upgrades its software generally every 5
years, you might look at a) 5 yrs b) 6 yrs (life of app + 1 yr) c)
event-based, i.e. "upon upgrade, replacement, or decommission of
application, retain license for 1 CY". I certainly don't think you'd need to
keep it for, say, the life of all records created using that application,
particularly if the records in question are otherwise relatively standard.
For example, if you used, say, Kofax Ascent to scan paper into TIFFs, those
TIFFs might be kept for years, decades, or longer (and subject to the usual
caveats about digital preservation which I hope this doesn't degrade into!).
But a TIFF is, by and large, a TIFF, and you wouldn't be limited to
accessing them through Kofax Ascent in the future, so you shouldn't
necessarily have to retain the licenses for that entire lifespan. Same thing
with Office - every Office format can be viewed with the free
Microsoft-provided viewers, and the more recent XML-based files with
third-party viewers, so once you either upgrade to Office 14 or replace it
with e.g. OpenOffice, that'd be it for the existing Office 2003 or Office
2007 licenses.
Hope this helps,
Jesse Wilkins
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