Hi everyone,
I am currently part way through a 2 year records management project at the Council I work for. I started with some priorities and a work plan which included development of a corporate Records Management Policy (done), Procedures & Guidance for Records Disposal (done), review of our offsite document storage (in progress) and onsite storage (due in the next few months). A key plank to my workplan that I am struggling with though is development/update of the council's Document Retention Schedule, so I am looking for advice by any other LA records managers who have been through this process (PLEASE NOTE: I am not looking for any contact from commercial solution providers).
Historically a Council-wide retention schedule had not been published for some years, and was based on the RGLA from 2003 (which is both out of date and not very comprehensive in terms of its reference to legal bases for retention). Meanwhile a number of departments had published their own but there was no corporate oversight or attempt at uniformity until now. I have been working on this for several months on and off, and have done a lot of research into our locally-produced schedules and other (recent) schedules produced by other LA's. This piece of work has now been pulled into the Council's GDPR work plan which will give it a better focus and profile in terms of getting service user engagement. The issues I have though are ..
a) Every LA schedule you look at is different - both in terms of the classification scheme used and the document types listed (I am trying to start from the LGCS and tweak it as I go);
b) Many LA retention schedules still refer to the RGLA - which as mentioned is poor on legislative authority for retention;
c) The number and diversity of business functions in a local authority means that even to map which LGCS business function belongs to which service/team is a daunting task (and the LA is forever undergoing restructures);
d) I am a team of 1 which has a lot of competing RM demands on my time, not least of which is to manage the transition of our historic (and not very well documented) offsite storage to a new provider.
e) Given the large number of document types a Council produces, I'm torn between 2 approaches: producing an "aunt Sally" proposal for each business area to review (subject to issues a) -d) above), or whether to ask the service users to undertake a full info audit. The latter may be very difficult to achieve as despite having got buy-in from the Council's Senior Management Team, the day-to-day reality is that engagement by service users is patchy.
So all things considered I'm struggling with this; and am due to kick off a new phase of effort as part of the GDPR work programme next week. Any thoughts/advice/pointers as to how to achieve a workable schedule in a reasonable timeframe much appreciated.
regards,
Pauline Carr
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