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Hi Fraser, It sounds as if you are trying to over-complicate this! A retention schedule should be built up from the records series created by the organisation and these will each have a specified retention period which meets legal and best practice requirements and business need. The length of time which the series runs for is irrelevant because the retention is governed by the retention schedule. So, if you have a series called 'Sprocket Reports' and you have to keep 'Sprocket Reports' for 6 years you can have a series which runs indefinitely but you will only retain 6/7 years worth of records. When you (or your departmental records office) does an annual destruction run you will confidentially shred any 'Sprocket Reports' over 6 years old which means any series can keep running for as long as the records are created by the organisation. When the series ceases to be created it will gradually be shredded as part of the retention schedule. Archive dates are a part of the same process. When you devise your retention schedule you identify the records series which you will need to either archive or review for transfer to archives so that at the end of the current life of the record it is either shredded, sent to semi-current storage for an additional retention before being shredded or reviewed for archive at the end of the further retention period or sent straightto the archive. This means that each departmental records officer will be using the same process to deal with their records and it gives them the flexibility to either wait until the retention period is reached and shred a years worth of records or keep a shorter period on-site and send the rest to storage for the remainder of the retention period before recall for shredding when the end of the retention period has been reached. Hope that helps, Rhiannon Rhiannon Birch Departmental Administrator Dept of Town & Regional Planning University of Sheffield Quoting Fraser Marshall <[log in to unmask]>: > A question for you all. > > I need to get a better understanding of the point in the records managment > process at which the dates for destruction on a record series is set. > > My belief, backed up by conversations with a few people off list, is that > the Record Series should have a single retention period applied to it - > e.g. all files in "Record Series 'X'" should be ones that need to be > retained for six years, rather than a mixture of different retention > periods. > > Do I therefore determine the date for distruction based on the start date > of the Record Series - a known entity, or apply the rentention period once > the Record Series is full - which cannot be known? > > Thinking out loud here, it occurs to me that one could control this by > imposing strict insistance on date ranges on Record Series - e.g. "Record > Series 'X' 2005-2006" - thus the start of the 6 year retention period can > be a known entity regardless of whether it is applied at the start or the > end of the Record Series. Does this sound reasonable? > > On a similar theme; Archive dates... Since I cannot reasonably be expected > to predict how long it will take to fill a Record Series, do I allow the > individual Departmental Record Officers to determine when archiving occurs > on a basis of space requirements or redundancy? > > I hope this all makes sense. Look forward to hearing your responses. > > Regards, > > Fraser Marshall (LB Tower Hamlets) >