Get help purging your outdated records all week, Aug. 4 to 8
August 4, 2014 •
UCOP Records Manager Laurie Sletten is available this week to advise you on how to make decisions about what to keep and what to purge.
Have you noticed the recycling bins around UCOP’s Oakland offices? Records Compliance week is here.
As part of the Efficiency Review’s ongoing effort to reduce paper at UCOP, Records Compliance Week 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 upcoming event, are different from the non-records that were purged last spring in a similar event during Earth Month. 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, Records Compliance Week is sponsored by the Less-Paper/Paper-Less work group. You will find 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 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.
Participate in Records Compliance Week and you could be eligible for a $25 gift card. Guess how much material (by weight) will be shredded and recycled during the week; or send in the oldest or most outdated document you find. Submit your entries by email to RecordsCompliance@ucop.edu by 5 p.m. Monday, Aug. 11. Winners will be notified and announced in an upcoming issue of Link.
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.)
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.
