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In an electronic age, the idea of Office of Record is about as quaint as hats for women at weddings.  But don’t sell the idea short.  It has the power to eliminate confusion, not to mention needless duplicates. 

Office of Record identifies the business unit responsible for maintaining the official copy of a record.  In the old days of paper records, the official copy was the one with the original, wet ink signature.  It was the one the lawyers wanted to take to court. 

Back then, anything distributed – meeting minutes, procedure manuals, purchase order copies – was supposedly an official record for whomever created it, but this wasn’t always documented,  particularly if there was no records management program, or if the program was largely ignored. 

So if a retention schedule said that the Safety Manual should be kept permanently (meaning permanently by the Safety Department that issued it), some recipients actually kept it forever, packing it away in cardboard boxes and sending it to storage.   Without identifying who was responsible for retaining the item’s official copy, the retention schedule inadvertently led to off-site storage cartons full of duplicates. 

Back to today.  Email makes distribution really easy, which is why, on occasion, an entire firm learns the calorie count of Mochaccinos.  Barring unsolicited nutritional advice, people on email distribution lists tend to keep a copy of what they receive. It’s a case of people keeping records not because they should, but because they can.  Instead of cartons, there are email backups that grow larger and more time consuming. 

Collaboration environments have solved the duplicate proliferation problem by eliminating distribution. Instead of emailing everything to everybody, team members can post one copy of background materials or project reports on the team site and everyone who needs to reference them goes to the site.  Likewise, de-duplication solutions can scan servers and identify duplicates before they are backed up numerous times.  But what about organizations that don’t have such solutions? 

William Saffady, in his book Managing Electronic Records, (ARMA International, 2009) offers some good suggestions.  He notes that there should be two categories of email messages – official copies and duplicates.  For email sent within the organization, the official copy will be the sender’s copy. It gets kept for the retention period.  Attachments can be separated from messages and stored apart from the email system. 

Duplicate copies of email messages (i.e., what the rest of the distribution list gets) should be kept for one to three years or deleted as soon as they are no longer needed.  They are, after all, duplicates. Saffady also is a proponent of uniform retention periods for email – but more on that in later blog posts.