Those of you who work for state agencies may be familiar with the recertification process, where the Records Management Officer (RMO) submits a records retention schedule of all the records of the agency with instructions on how to manage them. Each state agency must recertify their schedule every five years for review and approval. Recently,…
Of all the FAQs we get, this might be the most FAQiest of them all! Both local governments and state agencies want to know if they ‘go paperless’—if they digitize their essential records—can they get rid of the original paper or film copies? Yes! Records management laws and rules applicable to state agencies and local…
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…
Despite the acceleration of new technologies over the last couple of decades, if you ask archivists or records managers about best practices of long term preservation of records, they’ll still say microfilm is a solid choice. Much like paper (which has a life expectancy of thousands of years), microfilm can be stored for hundreds of…
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…