Answers to our most frequently asked questions.
Updated May 2020 If you work in a county government, you might have heard us use the phrase countywide RMO. Today’s topic is about who the countywide records management officer (RMO) is and what they do. The commissioners court designates an individual to serve as the countywide RMO. That person then serves as the RMO for…
Get ready county clerks, because this post is just for you… A common question posed to the analysts here at TSLAC concerns the difference between records series on Local Schedule CC that look nearly identical but have different retention periods. A good example is series CC1400-11 and CC1400-10. Both are for deputation records, but only…
Recently TSLAC has received a flurry of questions from state agencies and local governments about retaining records related to public information requests. Some people have asked if the government must make extra copies of the requested records and retain the extra copies with the correspondence and documentation that initiates, processes, and responds to the request. The answer is…
If the question is, “Can Social Media Content be a record?” then the answer is “Yes, it can be.” This is supported by the definition of a government record as defined in the Local Government Records Act (LGRA) and in the Government Code Chapter 441 for State Agencies; records can exist in a variety of…
When an employee leaves or is separated from the agency, you probably have a checklist of things that need to be done in order to close everything out for them. Hopefully, one of those things includes reviewing and transferring emails and if it doesn’t, it needs to! I recently attended a conference where one of…
Every day, our email inboxes fill up with all sorts of stuff: junk mail, meeting requests, policy updates, cat photos, leave requests, automatic response emails, blog updates. It can feel unwieldy to manage the amount and the type of email pouring in during the regular course of business. For some, the impulse is to delete…
In our last blog post about managing email, we looked at some examples and discussed the differences between Administrative and General Correspondence. Hopefully our brief examples helped you match your own correspondence to each of those series. The main thing about managing email that we want you to take away is that it’s always about…
Now that we all know most emails are government records – we do all know this, right?! – sometimes it can be confusing to figure out how to categorize our emails. First and foremost, always remember that email is a format, like paper or microfilm, and we decide which record series to use based on the…