Hello,

My name is Simeon Ivanov and I am part of the records management team in
a big Canadian engineering company. I have never contributed to the
listserv, but I constantly find many useful topics and learn from the
wisdom of its members. I hope that my question will contribute by
starting a useful discussion.

We are in the process of performing a records inventory and developing a
retention schedule for our corporate records. The question that we face
often is how to schedule records that are composed of multiple
documents. Often, the case is that there is one main document and many
supporting documents (back-up). The recommended retention period of the
main document could be longer than the rest of the file for various
reasons - reference, historical, evidential. We have to make the
decision on how to apply these different retentions to the various parts
of the record assuming that keeping the whole file (record) for the
longest retention is not the preferred method. One possible solution
would be to keep the most important document separately, but wouldn't
this affect the completeness of the initial record (which includes all
the documents in the file)? 

Another solution could be to extract the part of the record that should
be kept longer at the end of the retention period for the supporting
documents, and to destroy the rest. This of course could be costly to
apply when storing offsite. I am sure that there is more than one
possible solution for this, and it is interesting to see how others are
managing this issue. 

Thanks in advance for your responses,

Simeon Ivanov
Records Management
SNC Lavalin Inc.
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