Posts pertaining to local governments (counties, cities, school districts, special districts, etc.)
by Erica Rice Every state agency and local government creates and maintains employee records. Often maintained in individual files for each employee, the personnel file is added to regularly throughout its active life, and it may often be consulted during its long inactive life. We create and use personnel records to hire, re-hire, train, evaluate,…
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…
Recently, we have received many questions about metadata. Most of the inquiries about metadata revolve around two questions – What is metadata and why is it important. The purpose of this article is to discuss whether metadata is part of an electronic record and if so why. So, what is metadata? Metadata is the information…
Picture this: you’ve gathered up all the records subject to an expunction order and you’re ready to return, destroy or redact them as directed by the court. Then you look at the expunction order. It identifies the person in the order and it’s a government record. What do you do with it? Based on how…
As more organizations move from paper to electronic records, records management professionals face more complex challenges in managing these records. In their effort to maintain seamless records management processes within their organization, records managers expressed interest in products that specifically automate key records processes and controls. Records management professionals must ensure that the introduction of…
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…
If you read Joshua Clark’s recent post on text messages, you know that, depending on content, they can be government records that are subject to retention rules. The question then becomes: how do we capture them so that we can retain them for the appropriate retention period? There are several methods that can be utilized,…
Updated February 2025 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…