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

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