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…
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…
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…
We sometimes get questions from local governments and state agencies who are looking for vendors to provide records management services like destruction or electronic systems. While TSLAC generally cannot make any recommendations for specific vendors, we can help connect you with further resources which will hopefully help you make better informed decisions when it comes…
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…
Creating policies for social media records is vital to successfully managing those records and notifying the public of the areas that impact their use of agency social media tools.We’ve previously discussed the benefits and challenges of using social media, identification and retention of social media, and we outlined some methods of capturing these records. So…
We often talk about the importance of various roles in the world of records management. Most are familiar with the position of records management officer (RMO), but there are other important figures who have a hand in managing records. We will be introducing each of the major roles in a new blog series. Governing Body/State…