More purging: Records Compliance Week coming Aug. 4
July 14, 2014 •
Did you know that UCOP collectively purged the equivalent of nearly 12 four-drawer filing cabinets of non-records during the Earth Month “Digging Out” project last April? That’s the equivalent of 92 cubic feet or 1.5 tons of materials!
Now, as part of the Efficiency Review’s ongoing effort to reduce paper at UCOP, look for another cleanup event next month: UCOP Records Compliance Week, Aug. 4–8, is aimed at reviewing some of the thousands of boxes of records stored at UCOP offices and off-site to identify what can be eliminated to free up space and lower storage costs.
Records, the target of the August event, are different from the non-records that were purged last spring. While non-records have no historical value and do not need to be stored, some records do need to be retained (see caution, below), while others should be destroyed on a regular basis to minimize the need for storage and retrieval and legal discovery costs, as well as to increase administrative efficiency and assure compliance.
Like the April event, this latest effort is sponsored by the Less-Paper/Paper-Less work group. They will place recycling barrels and shred bins on all floors of UCOP locations throughout the week of Aug. 4. UCOP Records Manager Laurie Sletten will also offer 30-minute in-person or telephone consults on how to make decisions about what to toss, shred or send to off-site storage. (Contact her at Laurie.Sletten@ucop.edu or 510-987-9411 to set up an appointment.)
Among the tools and resources available to help is the systemwide UC Records Retention Schedule, which was updated last year. It provides a listing of university records by category (searchable by keyword) that dictates how long records should be kept and when they should be destroyed.
In advance of the purge, Sletten will host a webinar, to orient you to the Records Retention Schedule. Entitled “Trash or Treasure? Learn What To Do with your Records,” the session with be held Tuesday, July 22, 2 to 3 p.m. (click on date and time to add event to your calendar). Join the webinar via ReadyTalk; just go to the ReadyTalk website to get the deck and dial in at 1-866-740-1260 (enter 9870638).
Learn more about how to store or retrieve stored records on the records storage webpage. Send an e-mail to mailroom@ucop.edu with barcode numbers of any boxes you’d like to retrieve from storage for review. (Standard turnaround time is 24 hours.)
Look for more details about Records Compliance Week in upcoming issues of Link.
CAUTION: Please work with your department manager to coordinate the purging of any documents. Do not discard records that are the subject of a litigation hold or other records freeze or have been requested pursuant to the California Public Records Act, an investigation, an ongoing audit or other legal process. If you have any questions about whether records are required to be preserved for legal reasons, please contact the Office of the General Counsel.
I don’t see digitization mentioned as part of a paperless strategy. I think that’s a huge gap that needs to be addressed systematically.
Records digitization is part of the Information Management Lifecycle that the Paper-Less/Less-Paper committee will be addressing once departments have a better understanding of the records that they need to keep and for how long. A few individual departments have implemented solutions and we want to take those learnings and look for an OP wide solution if possible. Stay tuned!