Posts pertaining to local governments (counties, cities, school districts, special districts, etc.)
Today’s Analyst Tip video answers another one of our frequently asked questions around here: Why do so many employment records have a retention period of 75 years? Is 75 years significant for some reason? Who decided that retention period? Have an idea for a future Analyst Tips video? Let us know! Email us today at…
We’ve all recently read about several government officials using personal email accounts or email servers to conduct government business. But they are not alone by any means – a recent survey of 412 high-level government employees conducted by Atlantic Media’s Government Executive Meeting Group revealed that approximately one-third of the employees surveyed said they sometimes…
What is the Cloud? In our daily consulting, we often get asked questions about using the Cloud as a means of storing records. When we throw around the term “cloud storage,” we’re really talking about cloud computing, which encompasses cloud storage, or “renting” space on a server for storage; but cloud computing is much bigger.…
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…
Texas law authorizes state agencies and local governments in compliance to disposition a record under two conditions: (1) the record belongs to a record series on an approved records retention schedule and (2) its retention period has expired (Government Code §441.187; Local Government Records Act §202.001). As part of disposition, all Texas governments must use…
Information Governance (or IG) is hailed as the “next big thing” in records management, and was a prominent theme at both ARMA Houston and the National MER (Managing Electronic Records) conference, which I was fortunate to attend. So before I recap sessions that focus heavily on IG, let’s talk first about what IG actually is.…
Let’s say you have records that you keep in both paper and electronic formats. Their disposition date arrives, so you go through the necessary steps to check whether you can dispose of the records. You verify that they’re not archival. You’ve checked with your legal and financial departments, so you know there isn’t any impending…
By Angela Ossar, Government Information Analyst A local government was doing a records inventory recently and emailed me about notary public books. The question was: “We have a notary on staff. We pay for the notary fee (new and renewal) because it is essential to the employee’s duties. Will the notary’s records be considered part…