RADIX Solutions
Are You a Keeper or a Thrower?
By Dane Meuler, VP Business Development, Imagetek
I grew up with a Father who is a Keeper. The value of an object or “stuff” to a Keeper is measured by its potential value in the future including future generations. My father is fond of pointing to shelves of nameless “stuff” that he is certain will solve a problem someday.
The Keeper remembers every occasion on which they have drawn from the extensive collection of strands of yarn or straightened nails to fix a troubled situation. It furthers their obsession to keep everything. Amazingly the Keeper defies all logic and can pull from a table piled high with “good stuff”, the one object that is needed at just the right moment.
The Keeper’s filing system works great for them, but it is not very interactive or transparent to the outside world. I think most children of Keepers find themselves dreading the day when they will become the proud owner of the “stuff”, clueless about the significance of these items or their value. I am hopeful that an auction will attract the third person in the triune of “stuff”, the Collector, who will know its true value and will buy it all.
Are you a Keeper or a Thrower? Fortunately in local government we are guided by retention schedules that provide guidance to all of us, avoiding the questions about what to keep and what to throw. Do you have one and do you follow it?
As caretakers of the document we have a fiduciary responsibility to the trusting citizens of the community. The retention schedule helps define how long the value of the information in a document should extend. Unless the document has historical significance, once the retention is met, the value of the document has expired. Keeping a record longer is only expensive and sometimes a liability.
eMail has become a prime example of a record that becomes a liability in many organizations. We can explore that in a future article. For now we encourage every local governmental agency to consider their email acceptable use and retention policy. Regardless of the format of a document or record, they are all subject to a retention schedule.
Many documents in local government have a permanent retention. Getting to Forever can seem daunting, frequently because there is conflicting information about the best method for preservation. This we do know, paper and microfilm do not last forever.
If you have older documents preserved on paper or microfilm, you may have noticed that they are fading and getting difficult to read and in many cases they have become fragile. Many microfilm collections are contracting diseases like vinegar syndrome and redox, expediting their degradation. Aggressive action may be required and digitizing may be the best answer.
For instance the Declaration of Independence is not available to the public for handling or viewing. If you want to read it, you can view it online or reprinted from a digital image. Without extensive restoration and preservation techniques the original document would have been lost to the aging process, decades ago. The only way to get this document to forever was to digitize it.
We cannot afford to keep every document that requires a retention period of forever, in the vault, using the same type of care provided to the Declaration of Independence.
Our advice- get them scanned to a digital format soon. Done properly this will not only arrest the degradation, but it will provide a document whose information can now be accessible via the internet and be automatically backed up to multiple locations, ensuring it is safe forever, even in case of a disaster.
This transparency of information, especially for the current and recent documents will allow the public and other departments to find the information they need without interruption to the primary custodian of the record.
Given the disasters of this past year, there is no doubt that “it” happens. Thousands of pages of history have been lost, some of which were supposed to last forever. The total cost will not be known for decades, and yet the loss was preventable.
Imagetek is pleased to be designated as an Affiliate partner with the Iowa League of Cities and to offer the RADIX Municipal Co-op at a discounted price to the cities and to provide support to the League for further development of programs that benefit every municipality.
The RADIX Municipal Co-op allows any city or town to store their Minutes, Ordinances and/or Resolutions in a secure web hosted service that can be run independent of or in conjunction with your website, allowing full text searching of any documents that you have stored in the system. Your cost is based upon the size of your city or town.
Call Imagetek if you have questions about the creation of a Retention Schedule for your organization.