Picture this: you’re looking at twenty-years’ worth of overstuffed folders in the file room and wondering how you’ll use your records disposition authority (RDA) to straighten it all out. Good news! Applying an RDA is a lot like checking out your mail. Just like your mailbox commonly features junk mail, coupons, bills, or letters, the records in your office will manifest as one of four kinds of records– (1) non-record, (2) transitory record, (3) temporary record, and (4) permanent record.
When you check your mail today, let’s pretend the first item in this stack is a pre-approved credit card solicitation. It’s shamelessly addressed to “YOUR NAME or current resident.” This mail piece does not document anything about your life, your job, or your finances. You quickly identify this wasteful solicitation for what it is and, as my father is so fond of saying, “file it in the trash can.”
That pre-approved credit card solicitation is the analog of a non-record, which includes the materials your organization encounters simply by existing – think catalogs, flyers, or political ads. Non-records are also generated internally by your organization. For instance, duplicates and blank stationery are non-records. As these materials do not document the operations of your office, they are not functionally records; that means you do not need to submit a records destruction notice to get rid of non-records.
Let us say the next item in your stack of mail is a couple sheets of coupons. Now, these are more of a tossup. Their value depends on the coupons. Perhaps the first sheet of coupons is from your favorite café – you’ll tack these onto the refrigerator and possibly use them later this month before they expire. However, the second sheet of coupons is from that restaurant where you got food poisoning. No discount would ever see you back there! You toss these coupons in the recycling can with the preapproved credit card offer.
Records managers class this “coupon” type of material as transitory records. They are records of the briefest (hence, “transitory”) value, and include items like the pink “call back” slips or the ubiquitous “donuts in the breakroom” emails. While they are produced in the context of your agency’s operations, they do not document the work your agency performs in lasting or meaningful ways. Like coupons, transitory records have minimally useful, extremely short-term value. Transitory materials, like non-records, do not require a record destruction notice in order to be destroyed.
Let’s say the next item in your stack of mail is your credit card bill. Now, this is the first mail item that is addressed specifically to you, and one which documents your financial reality. It’s an important mailpiece, one you’ll review for its accuracy and use to challenge any incorrect charges or to track recent spending. You’ll retain the statement until its pragmatic value is exhausted.
Like the credit card bill, most of the mail that comes to your house is only valuable for a temporary period of time. Similarly, most government records are also temporarily valuable. As a result, we call this class of materials temporary records. Common temporary records include payroll records, purchasing records, contracts and leasing records, routine correspondence, and permitting and licensing records.
The final mail piece in your hand is a letter from grandma. Now, you know immediately this is something special. Her lovely handwriting alone sets it apart from the other materials in the mailbox. As you begin reading, you see that not only does she describe how she is doing, but she also includes her famous chocolate chip cookie recipe. In this scenario, we have examples of two sorts of permanently valuable materials. There is the empirically valuable cookie recipe, which anyone with tastebuds would call valuable, and there is also the intrinsic value (i.e., the value something has in and of itself) for you, the reader, in that this letter is handwritten by your grandma.
In the records management sense, records that possess significant long-term value are deemed permanent records. Records the State Records Commission and Local Government Records Commissions classify as permanent serve to document the operations of Alabama government agencies in strategically, legally, or historically significant ways. Such records may additionally, but not necessarily, have intrinsic value, such as one might feel in preferring the physical Declaration of Independence over a digitized copy or that a court may have in requiring a wet over a scanned signature. For local government agencies, permanent records may include things like meeting minutes, ordinances, administrative codes and regulations, comprehensive plans, annual budgets, official record of election results, will and estate records, municipal incorporation records, and marriage records.
Now, instead of approaching your neglected file storage room with dread, feel empowered by the knowledge that you are already primed to succeed. While you may not meet with overnight success, rest assured that records management is mostly the consistent application of your RDA coupled with your good common sense. Just as regularly checking your mail keeps your mailbox from becoming unmanageable, practicing regular records management can help preclude producing new records room challenges in the future! Whether you are new at managing your office’s records or a veteran records administrator, hopefully this mailbox conception will help de-mystify what it means to manage records, and, of course, if you ever have questions, reach out to us here in the Records Management Section.
Your friendly state records analyst,
ADAH Records Management Archivist Charles Busby wrote this blog
For more information on cleaning up a file room, see our post titled 10 Steps to Wrangling Your Records Storage Room
For the Record 