Professional records centers provide a smart way for private businesses and federal agencies to cost-effectively manage a record archival and destruction program. With the New Year, records from previous years should be removed from working spaces to free up that real estate for more productive purposes. Once boxes have been moved, what happens if and when they’re needed?
For professional records centers, the capability to pull, deliver, and re-file expediently and accurately for record retention and storage clients is crucial. Most software systems available for these professional records centers include this capability, such as DHS’ Total Recall. Records center managers scan custom bar codes with mobile hand-held units upon delivering a file to a specific location, automatically updating the database of where the file or box is.
Unlike a private business, federal agencies are required to maintain their records according to the National Archives and Records Administration Act. Under that law, 44 U.S.C. § 3101, the “head of each federal agency shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures and essential transactions of the agency.” This Act could indeed mean that affected agencies include memos regarding speech approvals, so that every speech and all its various versions could very well live in perpetuity in a storage box somewhere – and never be allowed to be shredded or destroyed. Just think: people 100 years from now will be able to read even parts of a Presidential speech which never made it into the “real deal.”
This permanent retention policy gets expensive for some agencies, because the volume of records for permanent retention increases about 5% per year. The US is not alone. Growth rates can be a lot higher if a government embarks on an inactive records purge initiative, like Hong Kong did several years ago. Looking at a huge mountain of information in their Public Records Office of Hong Kong (PRO), Hong Kong’s average annual intake of historical records was about 11%. Based on this growth rate, the total archival stock in 5 years’ time amounted to about 1,100,000 records items.
Though most private businesses will never have this size of an issue, this example highlights the importance of a document destruction policy. For private businesses which are ready to implement a document destruction program, records should be stored in a facility that allows the setting of automatic document destruction dates upon cataloging and entry into that facility. The barcode also tags each file or box with a date which can automatically trigger professional records center managers to pull and destroy boxes and files per a prescribed schedule. Clients receive a certificate of destruction either for a group of destroyed files, or one per box or file, depending on client need. Most professional records centers then recycle the destroyed documents and media. For x-rays, many centers even have a silver reclamation process before destroying films and recycling those into such new office interior products as carpeting and furniture fabrics.
Remember: spring cleaning should include a good methodical purge of inactive records, creating a more productive use of real estate, time, and money.
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Beth Reynolds, Storr Records Management, January 25, 2012