Records management sounds complicated and broad, but it’s quite straightforward. In our 2024 survey, we received feedback from people who were unsure as to what exactly we do here, and we thought we would take this opportunity to let the university community know what goes on in the Records Management Office.
What are records and why do we need to manage them?
When you write an email, buy material for your unit, or propose a new project for the department, records are both made and received. We made a record when we wrote the email and we received a record when we bought stuff for the office (payment receipt). We put those records aside because we might need to reference them at some point in the future. We might need to prove that we paid for the stuff we ordered for the office, for example, or return an item that is faulty. That is what a record is – evidence that we did something or decided something. Depending on the content and the way in which these records came to us, they can be transitory (temporary, not important after while), operational (important for years to satisfy administrative, government, audit or legal commitments), and archival (important to the history of the unit and should be kept permanently at the University Archives). But we don’t keep all these records types indefinitely; all records must be managed according to UBC’s Retention and Disposition Schedules (RDS).
Mandated through Board of Governor’s policy GA4, the Records Management Office (RMO) creates Schedules to guide units on how long they should keep records, and what should be done with them after they reach the end of their life cycle. For instance, schedule IM4500-10 Information Management says that Conversation History (such as MS Teams chat messages) that don’t document a decision will be kept for 90 days then destroyed.
Who’s responsible?
Who is doing the destruction? In this case, the messaging system has been configured to delete automatically, but if there is no automated system in place, units are responsible for carrying out their own disposition. According to section 2.5 of the BoG Policy GA4, “operational responsibility for Records Management rests with the Vice‐Presidents and administrative heads of unit”. Regardless if the disposition or retention dates are 90 days, 2, 5 or 7 years or longer, the unit responsible for the creation of the record is the one responsible for the disposition, which includes either destruction or transfer to the University Archives. The unit should set up their own reminders for when to check records and when to dispose of them. We suggest doing disposition actions annually in December when things are a little quieter. But we want to help.
RMO Services
If you need help conducting annual disposition actions on your records contact us, we can help with inventorying the records to be destroyed, getting sign off and we will even push the “destroy” button! We understand it can be stressful.
Unit tailored projects: which include Assessments and Governance Projects. Assessments are useful when the unit/department is having issues like difficulty finding records, lack of storage space, if they’re unsure of when to get rid of something, or if they need to re-organize files and they want some advice on how to achieve their goals. More information on how an Assessments works can be found here. Governance Projects are often associated with an iSchool Work Learn or Co-op student and can follow an Assessment or be conducted independently. A Records Governance Project evaluates your unit’s records and ensures that your information is being properly managed (they are easy to find, organized, consistent, associated with a retention schedule, etc.) and are complying with UBC standards and regulations (they are connected with the items disposition schedules and stored in the right place). Please contact us if you’re interested in one of those projects.
Managed Records Storage: If you’re having a hard time managing space for your paper records, you can contact the RMO to have Library Preservation and Archives (PARC) manage them for you. PARC is at UBC Vancouver’s South Campus, and through the RMO, records can be scheduled for pickup, delivery, storage and retrieval easily. Following the retention schedules, the records can be stored there safely. To arrange for a consultation with RMO about transferring your materials to PARC, contact us. The delivery and pickup date is currently Wednesday. The price list can be found here.
Shredding: We also provide shredding services for paper and digital media (such as DVD’s, cd’s, floppy disks, etc.). Please contact us if you’re interested in one of those services.
Further reading:
https://universitycounsel.ubc.ca/policies/records-management-policy/
https://recordsmanagement.ubc.ca/services/
https://recordsmanagement.ubc.ca/schedules/