Janis Holder, Frank Holt, Hal Keiner, Suellyn Lathrop, Madeleine Perez, and Barbara Tookey present.

The meeting was convened at 9:00. We began with a discussion regarding academic records. It was decided to ask Ed Southern to send our draft, when complete, to the North Carolina Registrar’s group for review.

There was a discussion of how to handle student academic information now maintained in databases rather than on paper. Most campuses have a different system and we are not sure that all campuses have switched over to database systems. Barbara Tookey offered to ask Robert Carver to meet with us and discuss the UNCG database system.

We began work reviewing the academic records section.

Robert Carver, Associate Director for Technology at UNCG came to the meeting at about 11:00. Hal Keiner began by explaining that we are working to revise and update the university general schedule. Janis Holder asked about whether the reports that used to be generated would continue to be generated. And we asked about retention issues.

Mr. Carver told us that an Oracle database can go on forever, especially as server space becomes cheaper. He used Admissions as an example. The data is processed, the source material may be electronic or paper and AACRAO gives the guidelines for the retention of the paper records. Records of students who have applied but not enrolled can be purges. UNCG is still in the test phase. They have several copies of the database: live, test, training, development, etc.

They will be working toward scanning old paper documents that still exist. They have already become paperless in terms of new students coming in.

Physically the metadata is separate from the pdf or data files. Mr. Carver’s personal preference is to never purge the records of students who have enrolled. The longer the data is maintained, the longer statistical analysis will be possible.

In purging records we will all have to be aware of the existence of backups beyond the suggested destruction date. Backups may exist for 6 months to a year beyond the destruction date.

Frank Holt asked about the state required index of the database. Mr. Carver told us that the database has millions of fields. The FRS database has approximately 1200 tables and the Student database has at least 1000 tables.

Individuals at UNCG (faculty, staff, etc.) can generate queries and their own reports. Data restricted under FERPA can be anywhere in the database. They have had to train everyone carefully and still some people have accessed and generated reports with confidential information. At the current time the solution is to warn the offenders and revoke privileges. In the future as they move to a data warehouse environment they should be able to lock down data fields and prevent this from happening.

We continued reviewing the academic records draft. We completed the sections on academic, admissions and student life. We decided to individually review the remaining sections financial aid, unclassified, athletics, student health and student housing via email and try to complete it before the next meeting.

Suellyn will forward the first section to Ed Southern for review and begin sending the second section to committee members for review.

The next meeting will be in Greensboro on June 24th. We will review personnel records at that meeting.

The meeting adjourned at 4:00.