On "Compliance, retention and Disposal...for the 
university sector" on 13 September if you are 
interested...details following:
please circulate to any who might be interested..

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Retention, Disposal and Compliance
                               

Much material is produced by a wide variety of people within a
university.  Some of that material will be transitory in nature, with
no lasting value and thus no need for retention, except in-so-much as
it might provide a useful template for a further instance of a
similar kind.  The rest of the material has some sort of shelf-life
of usefulness and requires some kind of policy for its retention
until no longer needed, or its archival either for historical or
compliance reasons.  To be fully compliant, keeping just paper copies
of records is may not be adequate if they were originally produced
digitally.  Furthermore, there may be risks associated with keeping
certain types of material and in this case guaranteed disposal,
according to a specific organisational policy is required.  The cost
of long-term preservation requires organisations to dispose of
non-essential or time- expired records, so that resources may be put
into safeguarding key information assets in such a way that they are
easily found when required.

Each unique document should be endowed with a status at creation,
determining its shelf-life in much the same way as transactional
records in paper form are tagged in a proper records management
system.  As a result some documents would be destroyed almost
immediately, some would be identified as requiring disposal at a
particular time or after a specific time interval, while others would
be archived, in the proper sense of the word, at the point of
creation as part of the long-term record.

This workshop aims to clarify the issues surrounding decisions over
retention, disposal and archiving and discuss the risks associated
with failure address those issues satisfactorily. *  It is not
desirable to migrate everything from the paper order to the digital
or to keep everything, so how do we achieve the appropriate retention
and disposal of records? *  What can we learn about the "risk
management", of record retention and disposal in relation to
compliance, from other sectors? *  What is the technological framework
for long- term preservation?

There will be plenary presentations on the major issues by members of
the Glasgow records management team and external speakers, followed
by smaller group discussions focusing on current practice in
delegates' institutions, in order to identify common problems and
tease out the risks to which we are all exposed by poor practice. 
Finally there will be a report back and panel session to draw
together the threads and give delegates the opportunity to ask
questions and thus seek guidance as to the way forward for their
institutions.




 


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Claire Johnson (Senior Records Manager)      
Archives & Business Records Centre    
77-87 Dumbarton Road                    
University of Glasgow             Tel: 0141-339-8855 x0659
Glasgow G11 6PW                   Fax: 0141-330-4158                
Scotland, U.K.                 E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.archives.gla.ac.uk (HOME)
URL: http://www.archives.gla.ac.uk/arcbrc/recman (Recs & Info Man.)
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Brenda Weeden
Archivist, University of Westminster
ISLS
4-12 Little Titchfield Street
London W1P 7FW
Tel 0171 911 5000 ext 2524
Fax 0171 911 5894






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