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Campus Computing NewsElectronic Records: (Almost) Everything You Need to Know: Part IBy Dr. Paul Dworak, Director of ComplianceT his will be the first of several articles on the legal requirements we need to meet here at UNT when we use E-mail and when we create documents on our computers. You may be wondering:Why is “records management” important?Well, to get right to the heart of the matter, more people are getting fined and getting prison sentences if they delete records before they should. Companies also are suffering financial losses if they keep records too long. So, what is records management?Various state and federal laws determine how long we must keep every type of document that we create. For UNT, the State of Texas provides us with a State Record Retention Schedule that we must follow. “Records management” means (1) having a system for filing records, and (2) keeping them only as long as required, but no longer. So, what is a record?This is the bad news. Every document that you create on your computer, and every E-mail that you send and receive is a State record. The State of Texas describes a record as a document or image in any format that is used in the course of business. So, that is pretty much everything. What’s the good news, then?If we have a system for classifying everything that we create and receive, then we can figure out when we can get rid of it. So, records management is a process of organizing and tracking our records. If we know what type of record a document is, then we can figure out how long to keep it, and we can delete it at the appropriate time. Transient RecordsThis is a fancy name for “junk,” and it also includes documents that have a clear expiration date. Announcements of meetings probably have no value when the meeting is over, unless you need to prove for some other legal purpose that the meeting had been scheduled. The State allows us to delete a document “when its purpose has been served.” For junk E-mail, its purpose has been served as soon as it has been read (or most of us would say before it was sent!), so such E-mails can be deleted immediately. Transient records make up the largest volume of everything that we create and receive, so if we can get rid of these, then it is easier to classify and manage what is left. All other records are grouped into “record series,” which are just individual records of the same type. Time cards are an example of a record series. All time cards for all employees in a single fiscal year might be the contents of one folder, but all folders filed for all fiscal years would be part of the same record series called Time Cards. All records in a records series have the same retention period, so all the timecards in a folder for a single fiscal year can be destroyed five years after the end of the fiscal year represented by the folder. Records That Any Department Is Responsible for ManagingThere are approximately 300 record series in the UNT Record Retention Schedule. For each record series, a department is listed as Final Repository. Many of these records are specialized, and departments like the Registrar or Purchasing and Payment Services are responsible for handling them. There are 70 record series for which the Final Repository is the “Local Unit.” Any department office will be the “local unit” for the records that it creates and that it uses in the normal course of its business. If you create the record, and if no other department uses the record in its business, then you need to manage it. Of course, most offices do not create 70 different types of records. Most departments use 17 types in most of their business, and academic departments also use 4 more records, one of which is also housed in the Registrar’s Office. These record series fall into the following categories, and the number or text in the square brackets [ ] indicates how long to keep the record
E-mail RecordsE-mail is not a type of record. There is no record series called “E-mail.” Instead, E-mail is a medium in which a record can be represented. Paper records, microfiches, blueprints, and electronic databases are other examples of record media. How many record series could be created by means of E-mail? In principle, any of them, but the most common would probably include Transitory Information, Administrative Correspondence, General Correspondence, and Unsolicited Resumes. Of course, any type of record series could be attached to an E-mail, but unless the E-mail itself contributes something new to the content of the attachment, the E-mail itself is probably an example of correspondence. For those departments like Purchasing, an E-mail might be a record of an accounts payable record, but depending on the circumstances, Purchasing might be responsible for managing such an E-mail, but the Local Unit would not. Transitory Information in E-mailsThis is the category that takes the most space and has the least value. It includes all bulk mail and junk mail. It also includes any E-mail or appointment that has an expiration date. For example, an E-mail meeting notice is no longer of value once the meeting is concluded. The E-mail has served its purpose and can be deleted (unless there is some legal requirement that a log of meetings be retained, but this is not the usual case). In most cases, “Everyone” E-mails are transitory. For most people, they may have no value at all. For others, they may have information about a lecture or event, and when that event is over, the E-mail has served its purpose. Some Everyone E-mails may have information about how to apply for a grant. These E-mails can be kept until the deadline for the grant has passed, or until the recipient no longer needs the E-mail. Even most Official Notice E-mails fall into the transitory category. Ideally, the sender of an Everyone E-mail should delete it from all mailboxes when its purpose has been served. If this is not done, then any recipient who has their archive activated will make a copy when the E-mail is archived, resulting in potentially thousands of copies of a worthless E-mail. Deleting expired E-mails saves space, and therefore it also saves money. Keep in mind that the Trash does not immediately purge deleted E-mails, so if you make a mistake, you can always “undelete” an E-mail. Depending on your settings, items may remain in the trash for about two weeks before they completely go away. What Is General and Administrative Correspondence? Someone writes to you requesting information about your department, its events, or its academic programs. You send an E-mail to reply to this person. Both the E-mail you receive and the E-mail you send would need to be kept for 1 year. Now, you can use your judgment about this. If the correspondence is “routine,” then you can consider it “transitory” and delete it “when its purpose has been served.” An example would be an E-mail requesting the performance times of a concert. If your job is to reply to such E-mails, then the E-mail you received and the one you sent have no value after the concert, so you can delete it them both. General correspondence is correspondence that you send and receive that relates to the operation of your department, but it is not related to decision-making and planning. If, however, you are on a committee, and the committee is exchanging E-mails to comment on attachments of reports and documents created by the committee, then you are creating Administrative Correspondence, and these E-mails would need to be saved for 3 years. Now, in this case, you start counting the 3 years from the last E-mail sent in the series of E-mails about the same topic. To file your correspondence in GroupWise, you could create two folders in your Cabinet—one called General Correspondence, and one called Administrative Correspondence. In each folder, you should create subfolders with the year (2005, 2006, etc.). For example:
In the case of Administrative Correspondence that includes committee work that reflects more than one year, you could use the name of the committee as the name of the subfolder, and include the range of years (TaskForce2005.2007). The subfolder name should give you a clear idea of the end date of the contents of the folder, and then you count one or three years from the end date before your delete the entire folder. If you have archiving turned on, part of the contents of your folders will be archived. When you delete subfolders, you may need to go into the archive to do the deletions. If the committee does work that has historical value, then the documents might need to be kept permanently in the University Archives, but the Archivist would need to determine if the E-mails themselves had historical value, or only the attached documents. This would be decided on a case by case basis. There is no problem keeping an E-mail longer than three years, as long as it is not kept forever. Legal Records HoldsAnother title for this section is “What did Enron do wrong?” After the investigation of Enron began, corporate officers discovered that they had been keeping records longer than their retention schedule required. So they started destroying the records that had expired. Too late!! Once a legal proceeding has begun or a subpoena has been issued, no records related to the proceeding can be destroyed, even if they have expired. How will you know that a Records Hold is in place? The Office of Vice Chancellor and General Counsel will ask you for your records. Once you get such a request, you cannot delete E-mails that you could have deleted earlier. It is perfectly legal to delete E-mails when they expire, as long as you do not do so after a Records Hold is in place. If you delete records after a Records Hold is in place, you could be charged with Obstruction of Justice or something worse, and this can result in penalties or jail time. So, the solution is to save everything, right?? No! It can create just as great a legal exposure to have a court look at 20 years of correspondence instead of 3 years of correspondence. The objective of record retention is to keep records for as long as the law requires, but no longer. The retention periods are set by federal and state laws, based on how the record series is routine used in business, and based on the number of years that courts and prosecutors usually want to examine. The bottom line: Don’t keep it longer than you must, but NEVER delete a record after the Legal department has told you that a Records Hold is in place. By the way—if you save a copy of an E-mail, and the sender deletes it, your copy of the E-mail is now considered the record copy (the original), which means that the E-mail was actually not deleted. Your copy can be subpoenaed and used in a legal proceeding. General rule—don’t keep copies of anything for which you are not Final Repository any longer than you need it. In no case are you allowed to keep a copy longer than prescribed in the Record Retention Schedule. Exception—if your use of a document changes its category (the record series that it falls into), then you may become the Final Repository of the document in this new category. This should only happen rarely, so if you feel you need to do this, please contact me. For any questions that you have about this article, please E-mail me at dworak@unt.edu or call me at 940-565-4906. See you in the next article.
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