Presented by Frank Holt of UNC-CH.
Discussion of Module
Why do modules? The modules show the various categories of employees at different levels. The module has the following columns: Form #, Title of Form, Location (office), Type (original, reference), and Retention. Location is important because records may be located in more than one place. Type is important in identifying original or reference copies in each location. The locations are confirmed through a serires of meetings with the principles involved in the creation of the records.
Listing locations where records are ALLOWED to be housed cuts the volume of duplicates across campus and also cuts the potential liability. This kind of listing reassures people that originals are being taken care of when they are getting ready to destroy reference copies.
The retention section lists laws and citations and gives instructions on where to send records to. The module covers the entire campus.
The SPA module took 1 year to complete. The EPA module took 2 years. The committee consisted of the records manager, human resources personnel, university counsel and other interested parties. They were able to develop good minimum retentions. They also identified some situations where there was more than one "original" or record copy and were able to decide how to deal with those records and the workflow that produced those duplicates.
Rationale and Benefits of the Module
- Establishes accountability of all EPA forms and their agreed upon file locations.
- Consistency of retention for all HR-Facilitators.
- HR decision makers support implementation, due to comprehensive inventory.
- Team approach of having HR experts involved throughout the entire process builds spirit of collaboration and support to comply with agreed upon retention guidelines.
- Confidence to follow schedule increases since the integrity of module is enhanced due to key HR decision makers who helped compile and recommedned appropriate retention needs.
- Decreases space needed to retain records, since retention varies depending on file location.
- Keeping updated will be easier since the forms inventory is exhaustive and can be circulated annually to Personnel Committee for comment. It would be this committee's responsibility to keep updated, just like the responsibility a unit has to keep their retention schedule updated.
- Can be used to help evaluate workflow for managing personnel records.
- Helps set a precedent for establishing close working relationships with other key decision makers in developing specialized retention modules for student records, financial records, etc.
- Retention guidelines issued by University Archives and Records Service become more credible and supported by campus liaisons and administrators because of collaborative efforts to solicit input from key players during negotiations.
- Introduces a facet of forms management that enhances overall records management operations.
- Provides a means of verifying database's design to make sure all needed content from forms have been considered.
- Makes it easier to analyze which documents have archival value, so if they are scanned and indexed, these specific forms can be flagged and captured specifically for University Archives.
- Layout of module has good potential of supporting web possibilities to improve functionality, etc.
