Guest post by Michael Stewart, Records Manager UBCO
“They are cancelling all in-person events and gatherings including the upcoming conference!”, a colleague informed me on the afternoon of March 10, 2020. “We would ask that you take your laptops and tablets home every night, just in case we cannot return to the office for whatever reason”, my department supervisor informed everyone at an impromptu meeting held the morning of March 11, 2020. We all have stories from the early days of the pandemic. Some are scary, others are comical, countless are heroic, and numerous are tragic. One way or another, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ensuing measures and restrictions brought by our public health and safety officers, changed the way we conduct and view our personal and work lives.
One of the biggest changes to our daily business processes was learning how to work remotely. Video conferencing and communication tools, such as Microsoft Teams and ZOOM, were dispatched at a rapid pace and users were expected to utilize the new technology with little to no experience. Most individuals were learning as they went.
Some discovered useful features such as screen sharing, emoji reactions, and directed messaging. Others had fun personalizing their backgrounds or discovering the wacky world of gifs. One feature available in most (if not all) of these video conferencing applications is the ability to record all or part of a session. While this feature may provide some benefits and advantages in certain business functions, from a legal and regulatory standpoint, there are things to keep in mind when deciding to record, store, and share these meeting recordings.
For this purpose, the Records Management Office has created a new guide outlining the university’s standards, as well as some generally accepted industry best practices, regarding video recordings created for administrative and operational purposes. This guide exists to direct your decision-making process as to if, when, and how to record, store, and dispose of your video files created with video conferencing applications.
We invite you to review the Video Recording Best Practices guideline and think about how you can implement these standards in your unit’s business processes today. For further information regarding records management standards, guidelines, policies, and/or practices, please contact your local UBC Records Management Office today (Vancouver|Okanagan).