After the last ARMA Conference I found myself again thinking about this problem.  This morning I revisited a 2008 thesis by Ahmed Ataullah at the University of Waterloo in Ontario Canada.  The thesis is entitled, "A framework for records management relational database systems," and was written for the degree of Master in Mathematics in computer science.  It is written from a data base management perspective but it definitely offers an approach that may be of interest to records managers.  I do admit that some of this is a bit over my head, but as much as I could understand it - the author does seems to provide an interesting model to address this issue.

I believe that the author is currently a PhD student at the same university.  You can visit his website here.  https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~aataulla/research.html -- it provides access to some research papers that records managers may wish to review.

In the event anyone from ARMA is reading this I would think that this researcher would be a good candidate to be a speaker at a future educational meeting

You can also read his dissertation here https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~aataulla/papers/masters_thesis_ataullah.pdf

I have copied part of the abstract below

"The problem of records retention is often viewed as simply deleting records when they have outlived their purpose. However, in the world of relational databases there is no standardized notion of a business record and its retention obligations. Unlike physical documents such as forms and reports, information in databases is organized such that one item of data may be part of various legal records and consequently subject to several (and possibly conflicting) retention policies. This thesis proposes a framework for records retention in relational database systems. It presents a mechanism through which users can specify a broad range of protective and destructive data retention policies for relational records. Compared to naive solutions for enforcing records management policies, our framework is not only significantly more efficient but it also addresses several unanswered questions about how policies can be mapped from given legal requirements to actions on relational data. The novelty in our approach is that we defined a record in a relational database as an arbitrary
logical view, effectively allowing us to reduce several challenges in enforcing data retention policies to well studied problems in database theory."


David B. Gaynon
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Huntington Beach CA, USA


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