By way of brief introduction: I have posted before, but it is on a rare
occasion. I am however, a frequent lurker. As a very “green” RM, I have
found this forum to extremely insightful, helpful, and often times quite
amusing…
Now my question:
Recently a staff member approached me with a question regarding a
situation in which permanent records were stored on the same roles of
microfilm as records that had met their retention. They wanted to digitize
the microfilm (for ease of use and retrieval), but did not want to weed out
the non-permanent records, nor be responsible for those non-permanent
records since they had reached their retention. I sort of took the all or
nothing approach: If you do want to sort through them, and you want to
keep them all, you have to be responsible for, and maintain, all of those
records (permanent retention or not).
I just got an email yesterday saying that, when asked, an official at the
State Archives told this staff member: “we could just keep the entire film
and just mark it as "perm". I could fill out my destruction form and sign-
off to show all other cases (non-perm) were gone due to retention.”
For some reason this doesn’t sit well with me. Authorize and sign off on
the destruction of records, which in fact you are knowingly retaining
permanently??
I supposed this is better than the opposite: destroying records without
the authorization, however it still seems to be incongruent with Best
Practices, if you will.
Any advice, words of wisdom, or related experience would be greatly
appreciated!!
(And would it matter if they were criminal justice records…?)
Much thanks,
Sara Rusher
City of Longmont, Colorado
Records Manager
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303.651.8648
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