Records Retention - smith-special-collections/sc-documentation GitHub Wiki

Archives has a twin field: records management. Records management is controlling the movement and use of records and information in a business or in a government agency. It includes caring for the storage of records, making sure that information is accessible for court cases, keeping and discarding records as needed by the organization and by law, etc. Often, records managers hand records off to archivists when they are no longer useful to the organization. Archives then assume that we will be keeping these records forever.

At Smith, we have no records management department, so staff at the archives do a little bit of both fields. We temporarily store and care for records of various Smith departments. All of the Smith records are governed by a records retention schedule, which tells us how long to keep records, who can get rid of them, who can see them, etc. When we process a department's records, we need to check the retention schedule to make sure we understand any restrictions and what we can and cannot weed. This check is done by the processing archivist, but you may be asked to actually do the weeding or moving of restricted materials.

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