Answers to our most frequently asked questions.
The local government schedules or your state agency’s retention schedule should list all of the types of records your local government or state agency creates or receives since the disposition of a record cannot be carried out if it is not included on a retention schedule. Even so, a time may come when you will…
One of the most common type of questions we receive in the Records Management Assistance Unit is how to classify, find, file, and match records to the local government retention schedules. By definition and use, a records retention schedule is a documented policy that serves to identify the records created or received by an organization…
Updated: November 13, 2020 If you work for a local government and have interacted with us, there’s a good chance you’ve heard us talk about whether or not you’re “in compliance.” We can make it sound more fun and call it the paperwork polka, the due diligence dance, or the Texas 3-step! But regardless of…
We have received a flurry of calls and emails after the 2019 legislative session from government entities concerned with the provisions of Senate Bill 944, which is an amendment to the Public Information Act (PIA). In this article, we’ll highlight the parts of the bill concerning records management, particularly when it comes to text messaging.…
A long time ago (relative to our blog’s history), we published the first of many frequently-asked-question articles about retention of email. The answer we give today when people ask how long to keep email is still the same (“it depends!”), but we have since published many more articles dissecting the topic. Today, we’ve compiled a…
If you’ve spent any amount of time perusing the local government retention schedules on our website—it is fair to assume this is the case if you’re reading this post in the first place—then you may have noticed in the Remarks section of certain record series a warning to “review before disposal…for historical reasons”. Have you…
When you read TSLAC’s local government retention schedules (“local schedules”), you may notice the word “obsolete” pops up in lots of different places. Some folks ask us what we mean when we say obsolete. Obsolete generally refers to a record that is no longer active. How your records management program must treat an obsolete record…
It’s been almost 6 years since we addressed this question originally. In that time, the popularity of text messaging (“texting”) has skyrocketed while awareness that text messages (“texts”) are potentially government records has increased very little. Here we go again! The definition of a government record in Texas is media neutral. A record is defined…