The Rule of Thirds works when applied to all records of an organization,
regardless of format. I would expect it to become skewed when just looking
at a set of records based on their format.

--Stephen


On 7/26/06, Julie Luckevich <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Hello fellow listservers
>
> I noted with interest the recent discussion on how much time it would take
> to review 7000 emails for an FOI request.
>
> We're interested in knowing if anyone has any experience in applying that
> old rule of thirds to electronic documents, in this case we were thinking
> just about standard office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), excluding
> databases and emails.  We figured it may be more like 40-40-20.
>
> For those of you not familiar with the rule, it says that, when applying a
> retention schedule to an area that has not had any purging or
> classification
> done in quite some time (or ever), one third of the records can be
> destroyed, one third can be sent to storage, and one third is what you
> actually use (active records).
>
> Given the trend for people to move more and more to just printing the
> hardcopy for reference then discarding it, I'm also wondering if this rule
> still applies to paper.
>
> Anyone care to venture an opinion or share their experiences?
>
> Our particular situation is applying retention to shared network drives
> that
> have been in existence for many years.  We're also interested in any
> ratios
> of official to transitory records that anyone may have, in relation to
> email
> or network drives.  We recently passed a new records retention by-law with
> a
> definition of transitory records, and we've been telling people to delete
> transitory emails for quite some time, but are there any studies out there
> that measure the relative proportion of junk to records to be saved?
>
> That old rule of thirds was proven true again and again.  Anyone want to
> hazard a guess if it still applies?
>
> Julie Luckevich
> Supervisor, Corporate Records and Information
> Regional Municipality of York
> Newmarket, Ontario Canada
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.region.york.on.ca
> 1-877-464-9675
>
> List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
> Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
>



-- 
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Stephen E. Cohen, MLIS
Records Manager & Archivist
[log in to unmask]
Tel: 203-376-5535
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