Kim,

Last Fall, while an MLIS student, I wrote a functional retention schedule
for a fictional large research university.  When assigning responsibility
for records, the first thing I did was to designate the "record copy" apart
from all duplicate copies that may exist.  I looked at a few existing "real"
research universities and was able to figure out where copies and/or
originals of records were kept and who used them the most over time.  I then
assigned responsibility for the record copy to one office and one office
only, which turned out to be the one office that used the records the most
over time, regardless of how many copies of the document existed and
regardless of who created the document and where the duplicate copies
resided.  For most of these, the personnel at the real universities believed
that the original copies (i.e., record copies) resided in the same offices I
had designated as the office of record.

My premise for doing this was that the creating office of a record may not
be the primary user and may be creating the document to fulfill a function
that was delegated to that office from above in the structural hierarchy and
the office that did the delegation may be the one that actually used the
record the most.  Another thing I did was to group records of a sort, though
it was an artificial grouping, based on relatedness of the functions
performed by certain offices within the university.  By assigning all
records that were legal records to the general counsel's office or all the
records of a student nature to the VP for students or dean of students
offices, I was able to keep the record copies of similar-type records in a
single office, thus eliminating confusion.  

A by-product of this (remembering that it was totally fictional project) was
that only about a dozen offices held record copies that may be transferred
to an archives or put into mid-term or long-term retention storage, among
the potential hundreds (or more!) offices/agencies that populate a large
research university.  If the model I created was put into practice and
actually worked, then the RIM team would have an easier time gathering the
record copies for the university's records and also an easier time disposing
of duplicate copies per the retention schedule.

Of course, by definition and in practice, my project was purely academic--no
practicality involved.

Russell D. James, MA, MLIS

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