I endorse fully the points made by Steve although the current perception is
"retention schedules" should be limited (restricted?) to simply specifying
time periods.
Perhaps we should adopt the term "Disposition Schedules" as the label for
the documents (or databases) that also cover the wider RM attributes and
management issues.
I recall that many schedules (documents) produced used by the (late)
National Coal Board (NCB) and the former Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries
and Food covered the handling of copies and specified the timed migration of
records to different storage locations. The NCB standard formats for
minutes of meetings, circulated papers and reports provided for the simple
differentiation between record sets, drafts, agreed versions, final versions
and copies by the simple expedient of including space for annotations in the
headers and footers of the first pages of such documents.
I thought this was a good system when I first became aware of it twenty
years ago and see no reason to change my views now.
Too many schedules have entries which require action to be taken a period
after the document was last used or closed. This may have been practical in
the days when a formal (efficient and effective!) registry system could be
relied upon but how many of these survive now I wonder.
Regards
Frank McCall
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