Thank you very much for the replies about this so far. Zoe and Nicki, it's really helpful to know you're in the same position as us, even if it's a difficult one!
As Zoe says, the immediate problem is that academics and students have different needs to professional services, but as those groups can overlap and interact with each other, we need to apply the same retention policy to everybody. Unfortunately, it's seeming like those in professional services who advocate a short retention period are going to have to give way to the needs of academics and students and accept a longer retention period. This leads me to three separate areas:
1) We have just had a meeting in which this was discussed and there was general appreciation of MMU's 12 month approach, as it would be a student had access to an academic year's worth of chats. I do still feel wary about whether conversations that should be kept for longer will end up in chat, but I suppose it is just something we will have to keep under regular review. (Keeping all chat for end of student relationship + 6 years certainly seems like overkill.) I am thinking I will need to look into exactly what kinds of interactions would we need to really firmly say must not take place in chat because they need to be evidenced elsewhere or retained for longer.
Does anyone already have an instant messaging tool (other than Skype) for staff/student conversations and if so what is/was applied to that?
2) Having a longer retention period (whether that's 12 months or longer) is going to cause some issues for staff who are already (just a few months in) feeling overwhelmed or irritated by their chat history and the inability to delete threads or received messages. As has been mentioned, there are concerns around FoI and SARs and the amount of information that will need to be searched. Has anyone had any experience with eDiscovery/Content Search yet (we are E3) that would help us in reassuring staff if we have to implement a longer retention period on chats?
3) In the longer term, I have to hope that Microsoft will bring more nuance to their retention policies in chat so that we can deal with academics/students and professional services separately. (If there is anyone out there who has found a way to deal with this without having to give up a short retention for professional services, I'd love to hear about it!)
Thank you again
Sian
Sian Astill
Assistant Records Manager and Archivist
University of Huddersfield
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